Because 2015 is its 100th anniversary, the Armenian genocide is finally getting some overdue attention.
When Aaron Zelman was alive, his JPFO made a point of calling attention to all the major 20th-century mass murders-by-government, including the death of well over a million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Aaron knew that it’s a mistake to focus solely on Hitler’s genocide. Because of course the more you view the Holocaust as unique, the easier it is to fool yourself that it was some one-off quirk of history, that no such thing will ever happen again, especially that “it can’t happen here.”
When we scripted Innocents Betrayed we covered eight major genocides and several smaller ones (there is no such thing as a “minor” genocide; the most obscure genocide is a major tragedy).
Every genocide is the same — and every genocide is different. The mass murder of the Armenians may not have been as systematic as Hitler’s slaughter of the Jews and other “undesirables.” But both were linked to a world war and perpetrated in a nation that was already under extreme stress. Both victimized a despised, disarmed, but relatively prosperous and influential minority. Both even have their deniers and excuse-makers. To this day the Turks claim that no genocide happened; the deaths were merely a natural offshoot of WWI and internal agitation by the Armenians themselves. (Just as other genocides in other places have been the work of “tribal rivalries” or “overacting local officials” or unintended consequences of government policies.)
The Armenian genocide has something most others don’t: a story of street vengeance carried out by the most ordinary of men. It was called Operation Nemesis.
Wikipedia’s account is rather dry, but the real events are as amazing as any Hollywood thriller.
Between 1920 and 1922, a handful of otherwise unremarkable expat Armenian men hunted down and assassinated six masterminds of the genocide. They were well-funded and working as part of an organization. But they were chosen largely for their experience with firearms. They had been smugglers, gun runners, soldiers, and (already) assassins.
They were crafty enough to insinuate themselves with their enemies. One of the assassins even acted as a pallbearer to the group’s first target. They were bold enough to stand face-to-face and shoot an enemy on a public street. One assassin was ordered, “You blow up the skull of the Number One nation-murderer and you don’t try to flee. You stand there, your foot on the corpse and surrender to the police, who will come and handcuff you.” (This because the organizers wanted a trial, which they assumed would be more of a trial of the genocide and those who perpetrated it than of the assassination.)
The men targeted for assassination weren’t innocent by any definition. They were officials who had already been condemned to death by an Ottoman Turkish military tribunal. Then when those death sentences proved unpopular with other Turks, the condemned men were allowed to escape to live their lives.
Until the avenging teams tracked them down.
Remarkably, most of the assassins walked away from their crimes of vengeance unscathed and unpunished.
Two new books have just been published on the operation. The one getting the most buzz is Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide by actor/playwright Eric Bogosian. The other is a graphic novel by Josh Blaylock, Operation Nemesis: A Story of Genocide & Revenge.
I haven’t read either. But both are now on my reading list.
