Biden’s historic Armenian Remembrance Day speech of 2021 on this day, the first official recognition of the Armenian Genocide by America, went as follows; “Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring. Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination. We honor the victims of the Meds Yeghern so that the horrors of what happened are never lost to history. And we remember so that we remain ever-vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.
Today, as we mourn what was lost, let us also turn our eyes to the future—toward the world that we wish to build for our children. A world unstained by the daily evils of bigotry and intolerance, where human rights are respected, and where all people are able to pursue their lives in dignity and security.”
Thus has our President and our nation given warning to the tyrannies of the world that we will defend the universal human rights which supersede the claims of any nation, and defend the people from unjust governments when necessary. In the context of the Armenian Genocide, especially this warrant is served to the regimes of Erdogan of Turkey and Putin of Russia, who between them now contest for the dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean in pursuit of refounding their former historic empires prior to the First World War.
With recognition must come reparations by Turkey, and the restoration of a sovereign and independent Armenian homeland. While the boundaries of Tigranes the Great’s Armenia included Jerusalem and all of Syria from Damascus and Palmyra to the sea, I think some compromise may be able to be worked out, considering that Turkey wants NATO support for its seizure of Libya’s oil fields through a puppet regime which is threatened by Russia’s massive line of Libyan fortifications and mercenary army; surely this vast wealth and dominion of the Mediterranean would be worth the price of justice for Armenia. Turkey and Iran may also find a buffer state useful, as Iran and Russia support the brutal Assad regime in Syria against the Turkish army and other liberation forces of secular democracy.
There remains the smouldering powder keg of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Russian and Turkish proxy forces, both a Civil War and Great Powers conflict which has been a theatre of World War Three. In this Turkish interests align with those of Europe and of America as a guarantor of our universal human rights and of democracy.
A Turkish fleet, especially one allied and integrated with joint NATO-EU forces, could end the war in Ukraine by liberating the seaboard and the Black Sea.
And with America undergoing a Restoration of democracy and independence from Russian conquest in the wake of our repudiation of her puppet Trump, a new willingness to challenge Russia’s imperial conquest of Ukraine, to liberate Russia’s vassal state of Belarus and Russia itself in support of the mass democracy movements which now challenge Putin’s tyrannical regime and imperial dominion, now is an excellent moment for a realignment of Turkey with America.
We have a chance to forge a peace together, Turkey and America, in which both of us win. My hope in this is that the world’s champions and guarantors of democracy, freedom, equality, truth, and in the case of the Armenian people most especially justice, may yet find a way forward to throwing words instead of stones, as Sigmund Freud taught us.
As written by the historian Heather Cox Richardson in her daily current events newsletter; “In his first major speech as Secretary of State, Antony Blinken laid out the principles of the Biden administration in foreign policy, emphasizing that this administration believed foreign and domestic policy to be profoundly linked. Biden’s people would support democracy at home and abroad to combat the authoritarianism rising around the world… including in the U.S.
“The more we and other democracies can show the world that we can deliver, not only for our people, but also for each other, the more we can refute the lie that authoritarian countries love to tell, that theirs is the better way to meet people’s fundamental needs and hopes. It’s on us to prove them wrong,” Blinken said. “So the question isn’t if we will support democracy around the world, but how.” He answered: “We will use the power of our example. We will encourage others to make key reforms, overturn bad laws, fight corruption, and stop unjust practices. We will incentivize democratic behavior.”
President Joe Biden has set out a foreign policy that focuses on human rights and reaches out more to foreign peoples than to their governments, heartening protesters in authoritarian countries.
On Saturday, Biden issued a document declaring that the displacement and slaughter of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians at the hands of the Ottomans in 1915 was a “genocide.” The U.S. had previously refused to recognize the ethnic cleansing for what it was because of the strategic importance of Turkey to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO (among other things, Turkey holds the straits that control access to the Black Sea, on which Russia and Ukraine, as well as other countries, sit).
Biden’s recognition of the Armenian genocide is a reflection of the fact that Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is increasingly close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Taliban, and appears to be abandoning democracy in his own country, giving Biden the room to take a step popular in America but previously too undiplomatic to undertake. (Remember when Erdogan’s security staff beat up protesters in Washington, D.C., in 2017 and prosecutors dropped the charges?)
Erdogan greeted Biden’s announcement with anger, demanding he retract it, but he also said he expected to discuss all of the disputes between the U.S. and Turkey at the June NATO summit. Geopolitics in Erdogan’s part of the world are changing, as Putin is struggling at home with protests against his treatment of opposition leader Alexey Navalny and with the new U.S. sanctions that, by making it hard for him to float government bonds, could weaken his economy further. It is looking more and more likely that Biden and Putin will also have a summit early this summer.”
As written in the website of the Genocide Museum; “What is the Armenian Genocide?
The extermination of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and the surrounding regions during 1915-1923 is called the Armenian Genocide.
Those massacres were masterminded and perpetrated by the government of Young Turks and were later finalized by the Kemalist government.
The First World War gave the Young Turks the opportunity to settle accounts with Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire, thus implementing the decision of the secret meeting of 1911 in Thessaloniki. The plan was to tukify the Muslims and to exterminate the Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Talaat Pasha (Interior Minister), Enver Pasha (Minister of Military Affairs), Djemal Pasha (commander of the Palestinian Front), Behaeddin Shakir Bey (Young Turk Central Committee member) and others were among the orchestrators of the project.
Intending to annihilate Armenians, they wanted to eliminate the Armenian Question. Armenia and Armenians were an obstacle on the way of the project of the Young Turks. Their dream of “Great Turan” was to stretch from the Bosphorus to Altai. During the First World War the Young Turks perpetrated massacres against Assyrians, Greeks and Arabs living in the Ottoman Empire.
In February 1915 the military minister Enver Pasha ordered to eliminate the Armenian soldiers serving in the Army. On April 24 and the following days 800 Armenians were arrested in Constantinople and exiled to the depths of Anatolia. Armenian writers, journalists, doctors, scientists, clergymen, intellectuals including Armenian members of the parliament were among them. A part of them died on the way of the exile, while others died after reaching there. The first international response to the violence resulted in a joint statement by France, Russia and the Great Britain in May 1915, where the Turkish atrocities against the Armenians were defined as “a crime against humanity and civilization”. According to them, Turkish government was responsible for the implementation of the crime.
Why was the Armenian Genocide perpetrated?
When WWI erupted, the government of the Young Turks adopted the policy of Pan-Turkism, hoping to save the remains of the weakened Ottoman Empire. The plan was to create an enormous Ottoman Empire that would spread to China, include all the Turkish speaking nations of the Caucasus and Middle Asia, intending also to turkify all the ethnic minorities of the empire. The Armenian population became the main obstacle standing in the way of the realization of this policy. Besides, the constitution restored after the Revolution of 1908 promised equal rights to all citizens of the Ottoman Empire. Armenians enthusiastically embraced this opportunity, however the change of status of previously deprived Armenians increased the hostility of the Turks towards Christians. This hostility was formed long ago, as even in the conditions of deprivation Armenians of the Ottoman empire provided unprecedented social, cultural and economic development. The genocide was a means to suppress this ascent, as well as to seize the Armenian wealth created during decades.
The Young Turks used WWI as a suitable opportunity for the implementation of the Armenian genocide, although it was planned in 1911-1912.
How many people died in the Armenian Genocide?
There were an estimated two million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire before the First World War. Approximately one and a half million Armenians were killed from 1915-1923. The remaining part was either islamized or exiled.
The mechanism of implementation
A genocide is the organized extermination of a nation aiming to put an end to their collective existence. Thus, the implementation of the genocide requires oriented programming and an internal mechanism, which makes genocide a state crime, as only a state possesses all the resources that can be used to carry out this policy.
The first phase of the Armenian Genocide was the conscription of about 60,000 Armenian men into the Ottoman army, their disarmament and murder by their Turkish fellow soldiers.
The second phase of the extermination of the Armenian population started on April 24, 1915 with the arrest of several hundred Armenian intellectuals and representatives of national elite (mainly in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople) and their subsequent elimination. Hereinafter, Armenians worldwide started to commemorate the Armenian genocide on April 24.
The third phase of the genocide is characterized with the exile of the massacres of women, children, elderly people to the desert of Syria. Hundreds of thousands of people were murdered by Turkish soldiers, police officers, Kurdish bandits during the deportation. The others died of epidemic diseases. Thousands of women and children were subjected to violence. Tens of thousands were forcibly islamized.
The fourth phase is the universal and absolute denial of the Turkish government of the mass deportations and genocide carried out against Armenians in their homeland. Despite the ongoing process of international condemnation of the Armenian Genocide, Turkey fights against recognition by all means, including distortion of history, means of propaganda, lobbying activities and other measures.”
As to more recent events which echo and reflect the Genocide of 1915 in the unfolding Nagorno-Karabakh Theatre of World War Three, here follow my journals of its progress.
September 26 2023 Victory in the Nagorno-Karabakh Theatre of World War Three As the Ukrainian Liberation of the Black Sea Gathers Momentum
Nagorno-Karabakh liberates herself from Russian occupation as Ukraine liberates the Black Sea, with glorious destruction of the Russian forces of occupation in Crimea and the deaths of the Russian Navy high command.
These event are related, as well as concurrent, for Russia is losing her grip on her colonies as Putin’s regime loses its authority.
Erdogan has outplayed Putin in this theatre of World War Three, one made complex with old vendettas and the legacies of history. But a predator is most dangerous when it is cornered and must win or be destroyed, and this is the moment when Putin will attack with the greatest possible savagery.
The liberation of the Black Sea and the Turkish eclipse of the Russian Empire in dominion of the Mediterranean means the end of threats of Russian conquest of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, but we are now in a race to regime change before Putin loses all his options of survival, for he might do anything, even unpredictable things.
For his finger rests on a button of global nuclear annihilation, and like an evil genie in a bottle it calls to him, whispering; “Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.” This is why we must take his toys away with decisive action now, while we still can, before he realizes his cause is hopeless and his empire is lost.
Now is the time to destabilize the Russian client states of puppet tyrants throughout the world, sever the Gordian Knot of the Russia-China-Belarus pact, leverage American and international solidarity with Ukraine, and bring confusion to the enemy.
As written by Edwin Markham in The Gates of Paradise and Other Poems ”When you are anvil, bear; When you are hammer, strike.”
As written by Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian, in an article entitled Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh victory highlights limits of Russia’s power: With Moscow’s resources ‘clearly finite’ the Kremlin has had to adapt to Baku’s rising power; “Azerbaijan’s military victory in the extended 35-year conflict over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh is a notable geopolitical setback for Russia, traditionally Armenia’s partner and ally.
Moscow’s post-Soviet strategy has often been to stoke conflicts to weaken its near neighbours, creating crises in Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. But on this occasion the Kremlin has had to adapt to Azerbaijan’s rising power – showing a willingness to sacrifice an old ally.
At the beginning of the month, before the current crisis, Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia’s prime minister, rued that his country’s historic “99.999%” dependence on Russia as security partner had amounted to “a strategic mistake”.
By then it had long been clear Russia had become embroiled in a quagmire in Ukraine – and so would be unable to prevent Azerbaijan from finally regaining control of an enclave of territory in ethnic Armenian hands over which it had wanted to assert control since the fall of the Soviet Union.
“Russian resources are clearly finite,” said James Nixey, a Russia expert with the Chatham House thinktank. “Karabakh is clearly an issue of lesser importance to Moscow, it is not a place like Crimea or Syria from which it is possible to project force.”
“In a way, Russia chose the wrong country,” said Neil Melvin, a director at the Royal United Services Institute thinktank. “Azerbaijan is much closer to Russia: the two share a border. It is clear who is now the dominant force in the south Caucasus, and looks like it wants to align to them.”
Azerbaijan is a larger, wealthier country than Armenia and an autocracy, like Russia. The country’s economy, supported by large oil and significant gas reserves, is able to afford a more powerful military – its $2.64bn (£2.16bn) defence budget is 3.5 times its neighbour’s in dollar terms, according to figures from the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Baku had already formed an effective alliance with Turkey that provided the Bayraktar TB2 drones that helped it win the last war in 2020, a 44-day autumn conflict in which Azerbaijan took control of the skies, bombing Armenia’s Soviet-era tanks and its allies in Nagorno-Karabakh.
It recaptured territories lost in 1994 and in the ensuing peace left only the core of Nagorno-Karabakh in ethnic Armenian hands, with nearly 2,000 Russian peacekeepers in place to control the borders and the protect the small Lachin corridor to Armenia proper.
But in the run-up to the Ukraine war, Azerbaijan also turned to Moscow. Its president, Ilham Aliyev, whose father was once a KGB official and a politburo member, travelled to Moscow two days before the invasion to sign an alliance agreement with Vladimir Putin. Azerbaijan later agreed to buy gas from Russia, raising questions whether it was using that to meet commitments to the EU.
Azerbaijan’s latest attack last week on Nagorno-Karabakh lasted only 24 hours. During the assault, a number of Russian peacekeepers were killed by Baku’s forces. Aliyev rang the Kremlin to apologise the next day, and the matter appears largely closed without Moscow making any significant complaint.
South of Azerbaijan lies Iran, one of Russia’s few close allies, and the three countries agreed in May they would build a new rail corridor along the Caspian Sea, although claims from Мoscow that it could create a trade route to rival that of the Suez Canal seem notably optimistic.
Armenia’s prime minister, meanwhile, has complained that the Moscow-dominated six-country Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) did not come to its aid, and some hope that it will now try to pivot to the west. Its parliament will now consider signing up to the international criminal court, which, if ratified, could prevent Putin, because he is indicted by The Hague, from visiting.
But that is a long way from Yerevan turning to the EU and Nato. “Look at the difficulties Ukraine is having joining the EU and Nato. A country like Armenia has no chance,” Nixey said. With a long-established Russian base, Gyumri, to protect it from Turkey to the west, a rapid realignment is impossible.
Russia’s inability or lack of desire to protect Armenia may not have any major implications for other post-Soviet frozen conflicts, because the countries involved have less power than Azerbaijan or simply less hostility to Moscow.
Magomed Torijev, a journalist and expert on the Caucasus region, said Georgia’s government was “increasingly friendly with Russia”, with no strong interest in trying to reclaim either South Ossetia or Abkhazia, while Moldova, with its own Transnistria separatists, was not ready to challenge the Kremlin.
In other countries, such as Syria, Russia’s alliance with the governing regime will help protect its position, and Moscow’s presence is likely to endure unless it is directly challenged. But what has changed, experts say, is that stronger countries such as Ukraine and Azerbaijan are willing and able to challenge Russia as never before.
“The reality is that Russia has been weakening for some time,” Melvin said.
As I wrote in my post of September 19 2022, Renewal of the Nagorno-Karabakh Theatre of World War Three; Among the many horrors of the multifront Third World War now being waged by Russia against democracy in the mad imperial conquest and dominion of Putin’s regime of war criminals and plutocrats, the renewal of the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict along with the destabilization operations of the Russian puppet tyranny of Serbia against Bosnia and Kosovo together signal an active threat to Europe and the world.
As Putin’s conquest of Ukraine collapses in failure and ruin, with Russian soldiers running from the battlefields in total panic, rout, and mass desertions before the victorious army of Ukraine, and his plans of glorifying the power of his regime ending in self-demonization and delegitimation, Putin now seeks to generalize the conflict. Russian tanks are not yet massing along the border of Poland, nor ships positioning for the capture of the Romanian port of Constantia and the invasion of the Danube, nor nuclear missiles hurtling through the skies to bring the extinction of humankind, but all of these possibilities are now far more likely. A predator is most dangerous when cornered.
Some voices yet speak of peace as something which may be clung to in the face of an enemy which does not recognize our humanity nor respect any laws or limits regarding our universal human rights, or seek mercy through danegeld and becoming de facto vassal states of an imperial master, though this has never worked and we should have learned this from the failure of Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” speech of 1938 to save Europe from Hitler.
To this I say; the best time to stop a war, a genocide, acts of terror and tyranny, and crimes against humanity, is before it happens.
Those who respect no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
We may disambiguate robber-baron Russia in this moment from the fallen Soviet Union it replaced by one simple fact, of enormous implications; Russia now funds, trains, arms, and directs fascist and nationalist alt-right political parties globally where it once did the same for communist revolutionaries.
We all of us who love Liberty, including those who now challenge the Russian imperial dominion and hegemony in the many theatres of this the Third World War, in Russia and America, Ukraine and Syria, Libya, Belarus, Kazakhstan, West Africa, the Sahel, and Lake Chad, Nagorno-Karabakh, and now the Gordian Knot of Serbia and Bosnia as Putin launches his campaign for the conquest of Europe, and as skirmishes signal an emerging Tajik-Uzbek conflict which will bring Afghanistan and Pakistan into an unhappy alliance with Turkey and rekindle the dream of a united Sunni Mughal-Ottoman alliance against Shia Persia, now Iran and Russia’s ally in Syria, in this moment as the world burns and civilization begins to collapse utterly it seems to me that we must face a great truth; it doesn’t matter who we are or what we call ourselves, only what we do.
This is the principle of impartial justice and equality before the law on which democracy is founded, and it has consequences for our duty of care for others; all that matters in the end is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
How can we understand and process Russia’s historical volte-face from liberator to conqueror and betrayal of our solidarity as human beings?
In the second episode of the series premier of the beloved and iconic epic and allegory of antifascist Resistance, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Harvest, we have a gruesomely parallel situation. Our heroes have learned that the enforcers of The Master are about to deliver the world in his dominion and need sacrifices which they will find at the local nightclub, and are ambushing the malefactors in a spoiling raid. Xander is focused on rescue of his friend Jesse who has been taken by the vampires, and says: “We’ve gotta get in there before Jesse does something stupider than usual.” I say to you now as Giles says to Xander; “Listen to me… Jesse is dead. You have to remember that when you see him, you’re not looking at your friend. You’re looking at the thing that killed him.”
I say again and directly to fellow Democratic Socialists, Progressives, Anarchists, and Left intellectuals of all kinds; Putin’s Russia is a criminal syndicate which embodies the final form of capitalism as totalitarian kleptocracy and the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil which she once so heroically fought against. In this I speak as a witness of history who fought alongside Russian soldiers in the liberation of South Africa from Apartheid and in other causes, and in Mariupol fought against them in the reformed Abraham Lincoln Brigade which we modeled on that of the Spanish Civil War.
The origins of evil lie not in an evil impulse as an inherent flaw of human design, but in the operations of systemic power and weaponized inequalities and wealth disparity.
And this we must resist, always and in whatever form it arises through all of history and the world.
As written by Isabelle Khurshudyan, Erin Cunningham and Miriam Berger in Huffpost; “The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region has simmered for decades. In 2020, the two sides fought a bloody war for territory — one that ended with a fragile Russian-brokered truce.
But on Monday night, fierce clashes erupted again near the disputed region, which is inside Azerbaijan but controlled by ethnic Armenian separatists.
Armenian officials said at least 49 people were killed in attacks by Azerbaijan’s military. Azerbaijan acknowledged launching the strikes — but said it was responding to Armenian provocations.
The renewed fighting prompted the State Department to call for an immediate end to the hostilities. Reuters reported Tuesday morning that Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke overnight with both the Armenian prime minister and president of Azerbaijan.
Russia is a key ally of Armenia, and some observers speculated that Azerbaijan may have sought to attack while Moscow is bogged down by a tough fight in Ukraine.
Here’s what you need to know about the fight over Nagorno-Karabakh, the longest-running conflict in the post-Soviet sphere.
What are the roots of the conflict? Why did Azerbaijan attack Armenia on Sept. 12?
Armenia’s Defense Ministry said Azerbaijan attacked the areas of Goris, Sotk and Jermuk in Nagorno-Karabakh using drones and large-caliber weapons. Azerbaijan’s military admitted to the attacks but accused Armenian forces of planting mines along the border to disrupt supply routes. Yerevan denied the accusations.
At least 49 people were killed in the strikes, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said Tuesday, adding, “Unfortunately, it’s not the final figure.” Azerbaijan also said it suffered losses but did not provide a casualty count.
Regional analysts said Azerbaijan could have tried to capitalize on recent Russian setbacks in Ukraine.
“This escalation takes place when (1) Russia is distracted as never before after the collapse of the Kharkiv front; and (2) offensive action against Armenia can surf the global wave of revulsion for Russia since Armenia is formally Russia’s ally,” Laurence Broers, an associate fellow of Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia program, said on Twitter.
Baku has “unprecedented leverage in every direction,” Broers added, as an increasingly isolated Moscow is now also reliant on land routes through Azerbaijan for trade with Asia and Iran.
In July, the European Commission and Azerbaijan reached a deal to double gas exports to the E.U. within the next two years as the continent seeks out alternatives to Russian energy.
The E.U. is pushing to “diversify away from Russia and to turn toward more reliable, trustworthy partners. And I am glad to count Azerbaijan among them,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said at the time.
Armenia on Tuesday appealed to Russia, the United States and France for help in ending the hostilities. Russia’s Foreign Ministry said it helped broker a truce for Tuesday morning.
“As we have long made clear, there can be no military solution to the conflict,” Blinken said Monday in a statement. “We urge an end to any military hostilities immediately.”
What are the roots of the conflict?
As part of a divide-and-rule tactic, the Soviet government first established the autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh, where at least 95 percent of the population is ethnically Armenian, in Azerbaijan in the 1920s.
But it wasn’t until 1988, as Moscow’s grip began to weaken, that the enclave became a flash point within the Soviet Union. Authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh sought to unite with the then-Soviet republic of Armenia and declared independence from Azerbaijan, another Soviet republic.
In 1992, after the Soviet Union collapsed, a full-scale war broke out between the two new countries over control of the region. Nagorno-Karabakh is located within the internationally recognized borders of Azerbaijan but is mostly controlled by political factions linked to Armenia.
Between 20,000 and 30,000 people were killed in that conflict and hundreds of thousands were displaced before a cease-fire was declared in 1994. Not only did Armenia end up controlling Nagorno-Karabakh but it also occupied 20 percent of the surrounding Azerbaijani territory, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Between 1994 and 2020, periodic skirmishes flared along the border, including the use of attack drones, heavy weaponry and special operations on the front lines. In 2016, particularly fierce clashes between Azerbaijan and Armenian-backed forces in Nagorno-Karabakh raged for four days.
But in 2020, a full-scale war broke out after Azerbaijan launched an offensive across the line of contact held by Armenian forces and local fighters. The campaign, which began on the morning of Sept. 27, sparked a six-week-long war.
“The fighting is the worst it has been since the Karabakh War of 1992 to 1994, encompassing the entire line of contact, with artillery, missile, and drone strikes deep past Armenian lines,” Michael Kofman, director of the Russian studies program at the Center for Naval Analyses in Virginia, and Leonid Nersisyan, CEO of the Armenian Research & Development Institute, wrote at the time.
The war, they said, featured “modern weaponry … representing a large-scale conventional conflict.”
One of the major features of the war was the military support Turkey, a regional power and longtime foe of Armenia, gave Azerbaijan. In the months before the conflict broke out, Turkey’s military exports to Azerbaijan rose sixfold, according to exports data analyzed by Reuters. The sales included drones and other military equipment, which experts say helped turn the tide for Azerbaijan.
As part of the Russia-mediated cease-fire, Armenia had to cede swaths of territory it controlled for decades. More than 7,000 combatants were killed, according to the International Crisis Group, and Russian peacekeepers were deployed to patrol the region.
The cease-fire Russia brokered “brought neither full stability nor security to the region,” Alexa Fults and Paul Stronski of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote in April. “And even before the Ukraine war, Moscow’s peacekeepers have struggled to do their jobs.”
Russia, they said, arguably has the most influence of any outside power to push peace forward. But its resources and attention have been sapped by the war in Ukraine.
“After the 2020 war, the front line has become longer and more volatile than before,” according to the International Crisis Group.”
And in a previous essay on this conflict, April 15 2022, A History of the Third World War and Russia’s Imperial Wars of Dominion Since 2020, Part Six: the Nagorno-Karabakh Theatre of War; That which is not spoken of becomes forgotten, and ceases to be real as a historical informing, motivating, and shaping force of our identity. This is why the witness of history is important to our adaptive range and our possibilities of becoming human, and why meaning and value can be created in the present as an unfolding and realization of the past.
Memory, history, identity; such recursive processes sculpt us across vast epochs of time as a stone is formed by wind and water. We are prochronisms, a record in our forms biological, psychological, and sociocultural-civilizational of how we solved problems of adaptation to change like the shell of a fantastic sea creature.
This is true of nations as well as individuals; and here I practice my art of seeing futures that might be in the stories of which we are made, using methods of literature, history, and psychology in an archeology of the future, as originated by Robert G.L. Waite in his study of Hitler, The Psychopathic God. I first read it as a senior in high school, and its why I chose these three disciplines of scholarship at university in my life mission to understand the origins of evil.
Here is the sixth and final part of my interrogation of the theatres of World War Three, that of Nagorno-Karabakh.
As I wrote in my post of October 10 2020, Armenia and Azerbaijan: Today a Fragile Peace in a Century Old Conflict; An ephemeral moment of peace stilled the thunder of war in the developing third front of the historic civilizational Great Powers conflict of dominion between Russian and Turkey; adding the Armenian-Azerbaijan theatre to those of Syria and Libya, which have destabilized Europe and cast the fate of the Middle East and the Mediterranean to the winds of fate.
That today’s cease fire falls within days of the historic 1920 Baku Congress which shattered the grip of European colonial powers on the world is no accident, but a distant echo of that vigorous idealism and vision of a new future for humankind.
Here are the ringing words of the closing call to action at the end of the Congress; “Go forward as one in a holy war against the British conquerors! …this is a holy war to liberate the peoples of the East; to end the division of humanity into oppressor peoples and oppressed peoples; and to achieve complete equality of all peoples and races, whatever language they may speak, whatever the color of their skin, and whatever the religion they profess.”
They are words which still hold true today, as we battle for our humanity, our liberty, our equality, and our lives against tyrannies of force and control in the streets of Portland, Seattle, New York, and across America and the world; in Hong Kong, Syria, Yemen, Chile, Bolivia, Kashmir, India, and that dual entity which is both al Quds and Jerusalem, among many others.
Yet Armenia holds a unique symbolic position in the iconography and mythology of genocide and survival, for the events of the 1914-1917 campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing by the Ottoman Empire were Hitler’s justification for the invasion of Poland. The text of the Obersalzberg address on 22 August 1939, provided by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of German military intelligence, to an allied agent is as follows; “Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter – with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It’s a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command – and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness – for the present only in the East – with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians.”
So it is that Armenia has become a symbol of the struggle between civilization as human meaning and value on the one side and the atavistic barbarism of an amoral modernity and nihilism in which only power is real on the other. And of the beauty of resistance, by which the powerless become unconquerable and free.
As written by Bryan Gigantino in Jacobin; “In 1994, representatives of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Russia, and the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh signed the Bishkek Protocol. After six years of deadly fighting and ethnic cleansing, this document provided a much-needed reprieve — and an immediate end to the bloodshed. But this produced only a fragile peace, and far short of addressing the root causes of the conflict, it institutionalized mutual enmity and the uncertainty over Nagorno-Karabakh’s future.
A quarter-century later, this September 27, military clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan broke out once more. Again, the fighting between these South Caucasus neighbors centered on Nagorno-Karabakh — a mountainous, unrecognized de facto independent state surrounded by Azeri territory. Once populated by both Azeris and Armenians, since the war of 1988–1994 the territory has become increasingly homogenous, with its 150,000 Armenians. The region is de jure part of Azerbaijan, but since 1994 it has been both controlled by local Armenian armed forces and wholly dependent on Armenia for security, economic survival, and access to the outside world.
Following the latest two weeks of violence, on Saturday, October 10, a cease-fire was hastily agreed. This came after ten hours of talks between the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan, who met in Moscow with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. Yet even this truce is fragile — only an hour into the truce and both sides immediately accused the other of breaking it, as reports of shelling abounded.
While the post-1994 cease-fire was broken by repeated skirmishes, the recent fighting was the most severe in decades. Previous instances such as the clashes in 2008, the April War of 2016, and fighting this July pale in comparison; this time, hundreds of civilians and military personnel have been killed and thousands forced to flee their homes. Previous upticks were often sparked by murky circumstances or accidents. But this time was different: for the Azeri offensive had been months in the making.
After armed confrontations in July resulted in the death of Azerbaijan’s major general, Polad Hashimov, massive pro-war demonstrations flooded the capital, Baku. Missteps over Karabakh had ended the careers of many Azeri elites in the 1990s; this was not lost on President Ilham Aliyev, who, especially given the economic pressure from the COVID-19 crisis, could not ignore the nationalist rage. Aliyev publicly stated that searching for a peaceful solution with Armenia was pointless. On September 24, just three days before the fighting started, Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs ominously released a list of so-called provocative actions taken by Armenia since reform-oriented Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan came to power in that country’s 2018 Velvet Revolution.
Following Azerbaijan’s initial offensive on September 27, the fighting rapidly escalated. Azeri rockets and heavy artillery bombarded the regional capital Stepanakert almost daily. Towns within Armenia and military positions along the two-hundred-kilometer “line of contact” separating Azerbaijan from Nagorno-Karabakh also came under fire. Armenian forces unsurprisingly responded, attacking Azeri positions and repelling drones — one of which was shot down alarmingly close to Armenia’s capital, Yerevan. But they also shelled targets within Azerbaijan’s territory, including its second city, Ganja.
There is, indeed, a substantial asymmetry between the two countries, with Azerbaijan’s defense budget, military hardware, and total personnel far outweighing Armenia’s. With a population of nearly ten million, Azerbaijan has a defense budget of $2.73 billion at 5.4 percent of GDP, whereas Armenia has a population of slightly under three million and a defense budget of $500 million at 4.7 percent of GDP. Notably, Turkish- and Israeli-made drones have played a central role in Azerbaijan’s military operations: Amnesty International confirms that Israeli-made cluster munitions were used in residential areas of Stepanakert.
State officials in both Armenia and Azerbaijan have fueled the fighting with a concomitant information war, unleashing a deluge of accusations, misinformation, and false data. Each state’s intransigent rhetoric thickens the abyss of unverifiable information widely circulating on Twitter and Facebook. Despite the best efforts of well-intentioned journalists and analysts, these conditions filter much of the conflict to the outside world. Even when more or less accurate information is available, the overall picture remains foggy. For example, Armenia releases consistent updates on military casualties but not civilian ones, whereas Azerbaijan does the inverse.
Yet such details alone do not explain why two neighboring post-Soviet countries with deep and intertwined histories are still locked in conflict. Fundamentally, irreconcilable official narratives and national understandings are central to the persistence of tensions and the reproduction of enmity. The region’s recent history can put this dynamic into a much clearer perspective.
For Armenians, the defense of Nagorno-Karabakh, or Artsakh as it is traditionally called, is an existential struggle. Between 1914 and 1917, 1.5 million Armenians perished in the genocide at the hands of Ottoman soldiers and Kurdish irregulars. The combination of forced deportation and indiscriminate slaughter depopulated Eastern Anatolia of nearly its entire Armenian population. Though the cities of Tbilisi and Baku were far more culturally, economically, and politically significant for Armenians, nationalists of the time had seen Eastern Anatolia as the future home of an independent Armenian state.
The permanent loss of this land created a territorially dismembered nationalism, in which not only a shared language and religious traditions but a sense of loss and popular memory of the genocide shape the Armenian national idea. This, in turn, fuels its intransigence over Nagorno-Karabakh — much like how Israeli irredentism often invokes the fear of a second Holocaust.
For Azeris, too, Karabakh is also critical to the national imagination. This mainly owes to the nearly six hundred thousand Azeris who became internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the fighting before the 1994 cease-fire. While some IDPs came from Nagorno-Karabakh, the vast majority fled seven districts in Karabakh’s historically Azeri-populated flatlands currently (according to Azerbaijan) under Armenian occupation. Since the end of the last war in 1994, the reclamation of these lost territories and the eventual return of their residents has been a pillar of Azeri nationalism.”
As I wrote in my post of April 27 2021 Biden Recognizes the Armenian Genocide; Biden’s historic Armenian Remembrance Day speech last Saturday, the first official recognition of the Armenian Genocide by America, went as follows; “Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring. Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination. We honor the victims of the Meds Yeghern so that the horrors of what happened are never lost to history. And we remember so that we remain ever-vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.
Today, as we mourn what was lost, let us also turn our eyes to the future—toward the world that we wish to build for our children. A world unstained by the daily evils of bigotry and intolerance, where human rights are respected, and where all people are able to pursue their lives in dignity and security.”
Thus has our President and our nation given warning to the tyrannies of the world that we will defend the universal human rights which supersede the claims of any nation, and defend the people from unjust governments when necessary. In the context of the Armenian Genocide, especially this warrant is served to the regimes of Erdogan of Turkey and Putin of Russia, who between them now contest for the dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean in pursuit of refounding their former historic empires prior to the First World War.
With recognition must come reparations by Turkey, and the restoration of a sovereign and independent Armenian homeland. While the boundaries of Tigranes the Great’s Armenia included Jerusalem and all of Syria from Damascus and Palmyra to the sea, I think some compromise may be able to be worked out, considering that Turkey wants NATO support for its seizure of Libya’s oil fields through a puppet regime which is threatened by Russia’s massive line of Libyan fortifications and mercenary army; surely this vast wealth and dominion of the Mediterranean would be worth the price of justice for Armenia. Turkey and Iran may also find a buffer state useful, as Iran and Russia support the brutal Assad regime in Syria against the Turkish army and liberation forces of secular democracy.
And with America undergoing a Restoration of democracy and independence from Russian conquest in the wake of our repudiation of her puppet Trump, a new willingness to challenge Russia’s imperial conquest of Ukraine, Russia’s vassal state Belarus in the process of an independence struggle, and a popular democracy movement in Russia itself leading the resistance to Putin, now is an excellent moment for a realignment of Turkey with America.
We have a chance to forge a peace together, Turkey and America, in which both of us win. My hope in this is that the world’s champions and guarantors of democracy, freedom, equality, truth, and in the case of the Armenian people most especially justice, may yet find a way forward to throwing words instead of stones, as Sigmund Freud taught us.
As written by the historian Heather Cox Richardson in her daily current events newsletter; “In his first major speech as Secretary of State, Antony Blinken laid out the principles of the Biden administration in foreign policy, emphasizing that this administration believed foreign and domestic policy to be profoundly linked. Biden’s people would support democracy at home and abroad to combat the authoritarianism rising around the world… including in the U.S.
“The more we and other democracies can show the world that we can deliver, not only for our people, but also for each other, the more we can refute the lie that authoritarian countries love to tell, that theirs is the better way to meet people’s fundamental needs and hopes. It’s on us to prove them wrong,” Blinken said. “So the question isn’t if we will support democracy around the world, but how.” He answered: “We will use the power of our example. We will encourage others to make key reforms, overturn bad laws, fight corruption, and stop unjust practices. We will incentivize democratic behavior.”
President Joe Biden has set out a foreign policy that focuses on human rights and reaches out more to foreign peoples than to their governments, heartening protesters in authoritarian countries.
On Saturday, Biden issued a document declaring that the displacement and slaughter of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians at the hands of the Ottomans in 1915 was a “genocide.” The U.S. had previously refused to recognize the ethnic cleansing for what it was because of the strategic importance of Turkey to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO (among other things, Turkey holds the straits that control access to the Black Sea, on which Russia and Ukraine, as well as other countries, sit).
Biden’s recognition of the Armenian genocide is a reflection of the fact that Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is increasingly close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Taliban, and appears to be abandoning democracy in his own country, giving Biden the room to take a step popular in America but previously too undiplomatic to undertake. (Remember when Erdogan’s security staff beat up protesters in Washington, D.C., in 2017 and prosecutors dropped the charges?)
Erdogan greeted Biden’s announcement with anger, demanding he retract it, but he also said he expected to discuss all of the disputes between the U.S. and Turkey at the June NATO summit. Geopolitics in Erdogan’s part of the world are changing, as Putin is struggling at home with protests against his treatment of opposition leader Alexey Navalny and with the new U.S. sanctions that, by making it hard for him to float government bonds, could weaken his economy further. It is looking more and more likely that Biden and Putin will also have a summit early this summer.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-16352745
http://www.genocide-museum.am/eng/armenian_genocide.php
Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh victory highlights limits of Russia’s power
Nagorno-Karabakh: Erdoğan praises Azerbaijan as thousands flee to Armenia
Azerbaijan launches ‘anti-terrorist’ attack in disputed Nagorno-Karabakh
‘They want us to die in the streets’: inside the Nagorno-Karabakh blockade
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/22/inside-nagorno-karabakh-blockade-armenia-azerbaijan
‘Russia has lost its soft power’: how war in Ukraine destabilises old Soviet allies
The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict: Historical and Political Perspectives, M Hakan Yavuz,. Michael Gunter (Editors)
Murder in the Mountains: War Crime in Khojaly and the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict, Raoul Contreras
Script of The Harvest, season premier of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
https://buffy.fandom.com/wiki/The_Harvest/Script
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/10/armenia-azerbaijan-cease-fire-conflict-nagorno-karabakh
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/10/azerbaijan-armenia-conflict-nationalism-colonialism
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/09/baku-congress-azerbaijan-1920
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/06/armenia-serzh-sargsyan-hhk-uprising-election
A Reading List on the Armenian Genocide:
A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, by Taner Akcam
My Brother’s Road: An American’s Fateful Journey to Armenia, by Markar Melkonian
The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, by Peter Balakian
Torch of Liberty 
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