Robert Jay Lifton and the Armenian Genocide

Robert Jay Lifton died on September 3 at the age of 99. He was a towering figure in the field of psychohistory (psychology and history) that he helped found with his mentor Erik Erickson, the eminent psychiatrist and historian who wrote Young Man Luther and Ghandi’s Truth. Lifton’s contributions to social thought in our time are central to our understanding of mass violence, trauma, and survivor experience. He created a new lexicon for thinking about how humans commit atrocities and how humans survive catastrophes. He opened up the discourse on survivors by conceptualizing survivor identity in his 1968 National Book Award winning study Life In Death about survivors of Hiroshima. He created concepts and definitions — a whole lexicon that transformed our understanding of our age. Some of them include: “Psychic numbing,” “doubling,” “atrocity producing situation,” “survivor guilt,” “nuclearism,” “counterfeit reality,” “superpower syndrome,” “totalism,” “malignant normality,” “proteanism,” “climate swerve,” “angry grief,” “symbolic immortality.” Among his two dozen books are The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and The Psychology of Genocide; Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima; Home From The War: Learning From Vietnam Veterans; Thought Reform and Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China; The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation; The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life. My own friendship with Robert is inseparable from his encounter with the Turkish ambassador to the United States — an episode that would have a large impact on breaking down the wall of Turkish denial of the Armenian Genocide. Robert and I came together at that moment and our friendship of the past 30 years was spawned. The story of his encounter with the Turkish ambassador could be part of a spy novel with an academic twist. When Robert received a letter from Ambassador Kanedemir on October 2, 1990 scolding him for writing about the role of Turkish physicians during the Armenian Genocide in his book The Nazi Doctors — his landmark study of German physicians who served Hitler’s program of bio-medical killing — he was surprised. But when he saw the pile of documents in the envelope, he was astonished. Inadvertently or not, someone had included the full correspondence that led to this castigating letter. It was revelatory. The inter-office correspondence included several pages from Mr. Health Lowry, Director of The Institute for Turkish Studies, funded by the Turkish government, in Washington, D.C. Lowry writes in a long memo: “I have located and read Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, with an eye to drafting a letter for your signature to the author… Lifton is a recognized authority in his own field who clearly knows nothing about the so-called “Armenian Genocide…our problem is less with Lifton that it is with the works up which he relies, Lifton is simply the end of the chain.” Ingratiating himself to the power of the state, he writes, “I strongly recommend that it be pointed out to Ankara that Lifton’s book is simply the end result of the Turkish failure to respond to Dadrian,” and the others. Lowry then drafted the letter that Ambassador Kandemir sent to Lifton: “I was shocked by your references to the so-called Armenian Genocide,” “to compare a tragic civil war perpetrated by misguided Armenian nationalists” to the Holocaust “is ludicrous.” And the letter goes on in an unctuous tone with denialist rhetoric. Robert told me that when he received the packet from the embassy his first response was to fire a letter back to the ambassador conveying his disgust at the denial lies and the harm they do. But then, he decided he could be more effective if he teamed up two scholars: Roger Smith, an authority on the Armenian Genocide and Eric Markusen, his co-author, for The Genocidal Mentality — to write an article that would analyze the psychology and corruption of denialsm. The article, “Professional Ethics and the Denial of the Armenian Genocide” was published in the Journal for Holocaust Studies in the spring issue of 1995. It is a necessary text for everyone interested in genocide and criminal cover up in the aftermath. It’s online and an important read for everyone. When I read the article in late April of ‘95, I was in a low state, having just been through yet another ordeal with Turkish denial. I was trying to educate the editors at the Syracuse Post-Standard who had to field angry denialist attacks from Turkish nationalists and the Turkish embassy after they had published my op-ed “Remembering the Armenian Genocide Eighty Years Later.” Feeling exhausted by the relentless attacks from Turkey to discredit all representations of the Genocide in our own country, I was fending off despondency. Immediately, I wrote Robert Lifton, whom I knew only by reputation, a letter explaining to him that I would like to go public with his article with a petition I had drafted, aimed at gathering a hundred prominent scholars and writers who would affirm the ethical significance of Robert's encounter with Lowry and the Ambassador. Robert called me right back and invited me to meet him in his office at John Jay College of Criminal Justice on the upper west side of Manhattan. I walked into his office on a Friday morning in mid-May and he greeted me with an affirmative handshake and the blend of calm and upbeat energy that defined him. He read my petition and liked it. The petition was asking fellow scholars and writers to take a stand against Turkish denialism and the other ethical issue wrapped up in this drama that had to do with the Turkish government’s efforts to manipulate the university curriculum in the U.S. A big part of Turkey’s denial campaign was focused on universities. And what had happened between the time that Robert received the packet from the ambassador and the publication of the article made this ever clearer. In 1994, Health Lowry had been advanced from his position at the Turkish Institute in D.C. (which boasted a goal of establishing chairs in Turkish studies at American universities) to an endowed chair at Princeton University named — no kidding — the Ataturk Chair in Turkish studies funded, of course, by the Turkish government. What had Lowry done to deserve this prestigious honor reserved for the most highly accomplished scholars in a given field? After finishing his Ph.D. in Ottoman Studies, he went to Turkey to work for a research institute in Istanbul and did some teaching at universities there and published a denialist tract attempting to discredit U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau’s memoir that included important chapters on the Armenian Genocide. Then, he returned to the States to direct the Turkish Institute. He had never held a tenured position at an American university, nor had he published a book by mainstream scholarly or trade press. Given this record and the fact that the Turkish government and its supporters had funded the chair struck many professors around the nation as not quite right. “Let’s get going,” Robert said, and we talked for the next two hours. I told him that thought if we could flash a light on this scandal, we could raise a mainstream awareness about the Armenian Genocide and Turkish denial in a way that had never happened before. The Lifton/Markusen/Smith essay closed by weighing in on the impact of denialism and the unethical and careerist motivations of scholars who choose to promote it. “Denial contributes to genocide and continues the process of genocide”; “Where scholars deny genocide, in the face of decisive evidence, they contribute to false consciousness that can have the most dire reverberations. Their message is, in effect is: murderers did not really murder, victims were not really killed; mass murder requires no confrontation… by closing their minds to the truth scholars contribute to the deadly psychohistorical dynamic in which unopposed genocide begets new genocides.” Our petition, “Taking A Stand Against the Turkish Government’s Denial of the Armenian Genocide and Scholarly Corruption in the Academy,” went viral. I had my friends and colleagues around the nation and Robert had his friends and colleagues, and there were dozens of other prominent scholars whom neither of us knew but who were indignant about this compounded corruption and were happy to sign. For several months, I made phone calls, sent faxes and emails, gathering name after name. There were long and short conversations at late hours of the evening. Everyone who signed expressed their deep moral concern and many their outrage. I called Robert’s colleagues and friends Norman Mailer, David Brion Davis, William Sloane Coffin, Judith Herman, Daniel Ellsberg, Catherine Bateson, Cathy Caruth — all of whom signed enthusiastically. My colleagues and fellow writers who signed included Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Alfred Kazin, Robert Pinsky, Arthur Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, William and Rose Styron. I was uplifted when Susan Sontag faxed me back a big yes, happy to sign in a few minutes. Prominent Holocaust scholars Robert Melson, Roger Smith, Helen Fein, Raul Hilberg, Deborah Lipstadt, Deborah Dwork, Yehuda Bauer were vital. Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, Anthony Appiah, Houston Baker gave essential moral weight. With more than 150 signers such as these and the dovetailing of Turkish denialism and the Lowry appointment at Princeton — the petition was covered by the mainstream press. When a headline ran in The New York Times in May of ‘96 “Princeton Accused of Fronting for the Turkish Government,” with a photograph of me with my hand raised at the podium during an address I gave at the Princeton Club in New York City, I knew we were being heard. The Boston Globe, LA Times, Chronicle of Higher Education and others followed. Legislators on Capitol Hill and at local levels were also getting it: Turkey manipulating higher education, coercing opinion in America and denying genocide My friendship with Robert was defined by our shared intellectual, political and activist projects and passions and our avid fandom for the Knicks, the Dodgers (his team) and the Yankees. Almost every year from ‘95 on I was at his yearly four-day seminar held at his house on Cape Cod, known as the Wellfleet Meetings — where I often presented a paper or read my poems. When we celebrated Robert’s birthday over dinner, as we did most every year, we would lift a glass to the work that brought us together in the spring of 1995.

Robert Jay Lifton and the Armenian Genocide

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Peter Balakian

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Peter Balakian

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