Review of “The Great Game of Genocide” by Donald Bloxham as it pertains to Ottoman Greeks
Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
The author, Donald Bloxham, is currently a professor of Modern History at the University of Edinburgh. His book, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians, has received wide acclaim including the 2007 Raphael Lemkin biennial award and numerous glowing reviews. As the title suggests, Bloxham deals principally with the fate of the Ottoman Armenians. This review, however, will focus on the accuracy of the coverage given to the fate of Ottoman Greeks and not on the merits and failures of the book as a whole.
According to Bloxham, “In the interests of context and comparison the book will incorporate reference to the fate of Ottoman ‘Assyrians’, Greeks, and Kurds during and after the First World War …” (p. 10). However, despite this opening promise of an inclusive narrative, the book’s introduction is tainted by an ominous piece of writing:
“The Armenian genocide was more systematic and thorough than the CUP’s attack on the Assyrians. Collectively, Armenian suffering was more intense, and the state intent more explicitly murderous, than was to be the case in either the post-war purge of ‘ethnic Greeks’ from Anatolia and the reciprocal purge of Muslims from Greek territory, or the prolonged Kemalist assault on the Kurds.” (p. 10)
With this passage Bloxham takes the sinister step of formulating a hierarchy of victims in which “Armenian suffering” takes center stage and where all other victim groups are relegated to second place. In recent years genocide scholars have been vocal in condemning those who employ such standards in comparative studies and have affirmed that the distasteful practice has no place in scholarship. For example, Prof. Gerald Caplan writes “All genocides are morally equal—it is not helpful to insist on a hierarchy of genocides, it only causes division in the field of studies.” Bloxham does not elaborate on how he defines collective suffering or a measure of its intensity but, in any case, his statement raises a number of questions about his own perception of group suffering and his apparent view that certain groups should be granted a limelight. Would Bloxham, for instance, go on to claim Jewish suffering was “more intense” than Armenian suffering? Or that Jewish suffering was more intense than that of the Roma or Poles? Such questions extend well beyond the boundaries of genocide scholarship. Finally, it is worth pointing out that the passage is misleading in that it would have the reader believe that Ottoman Greek suffering was merely a post-war phenomenon—a so-called “purge”—when in actual fact it was a pre-war phenomenon—by all accounts, predating the Armenian Genocide—which continued during the Great War and for several years afterwards. A similar point can be made so far as the Kurds.
To his credit later in the work Bloxham affirms this point exactly by making references to earlier acts of expulsion and deportation towards the Greeks. This includes the mention of “expulsions of perhaps 130,000 ethnic Greeks to Greece from the Aegean islands, Thrace, and then the western Anatolian coast in 1913–14.”(p. 63) and that in 1915 “in excess of 40,000 [Greeks] were thus deported to the interior” (p. 72). However, such references are blighted by a general failure to present events in the context of a larger program of massacres, internal deportations and external expulsions during the same period and in other regions of the Empire. To give another example, on page 72 Bloxham writes that “… the two thousand inhabitants of the Greek village Arnavutköj (sic) on the Bosphorus were given twenty-four hours to leave their homes on suspicion that they would support Russian landings.” The town’s name is actually spelt Arnavutköy and its population numbered vastly more than 2,000. Bloxham does not include reference to deportations of Ottoman Greeks from Istanbul’s various other districts even when mentioning Armenian deportations at the same time and place. This policy of interposing references on Greeks in a disjoint, isolated and sporadic fashion is prevalent throughout the text and there is often little or no reason offered as to why doing so sheds any further light on the Armenian Genocide, the subject Bloxham is addressing.
Bloxham’s coverage on Greeks shifts very swiftly to the 1919-1922 period. Skewing the study in this way yields an unbalanced narrative but, ironically, in the timeframe where Bloxham’s feels most comfortable is where the work falls apart most obviously. Bloxham’s account on the Greeks is not just incomplete or misleading but, at times, blatantly erroneous—errors range from relatively superficial mistakes to gross inaccuracies which significantly undermine the quality of the account. To illustrate this point, let us examine the following passage as an example:
“As the Greek troops disembarked at Smyrna/Izmir on 16 May they were blessed by the local orthodox archbishop Chrysostomos. This was hardly an encouraging sign for local Muslims, but was as nothing compared with the humiliations imposed by some of the Greek soldiers, and the outbreak of inter-communal atrocities triggered by the Greek presence, in which the Greeks were the greater perpetrators, culminating in the destruction of the Muslim parts of the town of Adalia.”
In fact, Hellenic troops arrived at Smyrna on the morning of 15 May; not on 16 May. Adalia, the former name of today’s Antalya, was never even occupied by Hellenic troops let alone destroyed by them. The city was actually occupied by Italians.
One work seemingly at the heart of Bloxham’s grasp of the Ottoman Greek fate is Arnold J. Toynbee’s The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilizations (London: Constable and Co., 1922), a book which has been subject to fierce criticism with respect to its impartiality and reliability and a book which led to Toynbee's 1924 resignation from his professorship in London. As will soon become clear, Bloxham’s heavy dependence on this work has severely undermined the quality of his account as it pertains to the Greeks.
In the 1998 edition of her acclaimed book Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City, Professor Marjorie Housepian Dobkin refers to the The Western Question as a “source favoring the Turkish view of the Greco-Turkish war”. Bruce Clark, on the other hand, feels that Arnold Toynbee made a “commendable effort, denouncing the atrocities of Turks and Greeks alike …” (“Truth among the rubble”, The Tablet, 5 July 2008). Incidentally, this is the same Bruce Clark that rejects the genocide thesis so far as the Armenians are concerned and endorses McCarthy’s et al now infamous “mutual slaughter” revisionist argument. Bloxham, it seems, has joined an unlikely crowd of Toynbee advocates.
Prof. Housepian Dobkin states that Toynbee “did an about-face in The Western Question … without doubt because he equated all violence, denying qualitative differences in motive.” She continues, “This does not coincide with my conviction that motives and circumstances must be weighed. … Toynbee’s theory of history, which does not always accommodate particulars, and his infusion of Christian ethics in areas where these do not suit drove him to contradict himself more than once on the question of the Armenian ‘exterminations.’” In particular, Toynbee equates the Turkish massacres of hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Greeks as part of a centrally planned and coordinated government campaign with isolated and sporadic excesses committed by some Hellenic troops in a zone of war several years later under the umbrella term of “war of extermination”. Bloxham apparently endorses Toynbee’s term “war of extermination” seeing fit to mention or use it twice in his text. Note that The Western Question is cited as a source no less than five times and recorded in Bloxham’s bibliography indicating it was a key source.
It should be noted that Toynbee later went on to suggest that Armenians shared responsibility for the burning of Smyrna and in The Western Question he describes the ‘Blue Book’ or The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as “war-propaganda”. Bloxham, however, has no qualms about attributing the fire of Smyrna to “agents of the nationalists [as] the probable arsonists” and gives zero credence to the claim that Armenians must share responsibility for the burning of the city. Further, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire is a work that Bloxham has no hesitation in relying on as a trustworthy source on a number of occasions. The point here is not that the volume is a work of propaganda—indeed, Ara Sarafian and others before him have refuted this allegation—or that the Armenians burnt Smyrna—another ridiculous accusation—but that Bloxham has been selective, adopting one rule for the Armenians and another for the Greeks based on a work that is so transparently flawed by a writer that has contradicted himself several times on these very issues. The question still remains. Why did Bloxham reject Toynbee’s conclusions so far as the Armenians but accept them so wholeheartedly when it came to the Greeks? It would indicate that accepted standards of scholarship have not been followed.
Referring to the population exchange, on page 106 we read: “According to that arrangement, in 1923–6, with a significant death toll on either side, some 1.25 million Greeks and 356,000 Turks, defined by religion rather than ethnicity as such, inter-migrated to conclude the homogenization process with the approval of what would now be called the international community.” Had Bloxham’s reading on the Greeks not been so limited he would have known that 1.25 million Greeks were never transferred by that “arrangement” and that, in actual fact, the majority of Greece’s post-Lausanne refugees had left Turkey before any agreement was formalized. According to the Commission overseeing the exchange only 190,000 Greeks were transferred from Turkey to Greece indicating that Bloxham failed to distinguish between fleeing refugees and those transferred as part of the exchange. Even as a combined refugee estimate the “1.25 million Greeks” figure appears excessive in light of census figures which reveal that in total only 1,104,216 refugees—Greeks, Armenians and others—ever reached Greece from Ottoman Turkey. To this end, it would suggest the number cited by Bloxham also incorporate refugees from Bulgaria, Caucasus, Russia, Serbia, Albania, Dodecanese, Romania, Cyprus and Egypt who are recorded as fleeing to Greece during the same period. Further, although Bloxham correctly notes the exchange was based on “religion rather than ethnicity” it is surprising he still chooses to identify the groups as ‘Greeks and Turks’ rather than ‘Christians and Muslims’. The time frame given for the exchange, namely 1923-1926, is also incorrect.
At the April 2004 “War, Culture and Humanity” conference hosted by the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, Dr. Donald Bloxham, one of the speakers at the event, was asked whether he had ever studied the Greeks of Asia Minor. He replied that he had not. This is incredibly alarming given that according to the book’s preface the “research and much of the writing were completed … from 2000 to 2002” and in light of the fact that The Great Game of Genocide (2005) contains a set of firm—albeit poorly formed—conclusions characterizing Ottoman Greek suffering. This admission by itself calls into serious doubt Bloxham’s suitability to be making definitive assertions on the quality of the Ottoman Turkish campaign against the Ottoman Greeks. Bloxham did precisely the same with the Assyrians but on 1 October 2007 acknowledged that what he had written on the Assyrians reflected his “state of knowledge/ignorance and judgement” at the time. He conceded that his account on the Assyrians was far from an accurate representation of their fate: “I realised that the fate of the Assyrians was numerically much more extensive than I realised, and bore more similarities to that of the Armenians than I had realised."
So far as the Greeks, the deficiencies of Bloxham’s study may be summarized as follows. There is an unhealthy imbalance and focus on 1919-22 with only scant, incomplete, disjoint and often misleading references to earlier instances of Ottoman Greek suffering. Factual errors are prevalent throughout the text. The few sources consulted are questionable in terms of reliability and impartiality. There has been little effort to consult primary or secondary source documentation on the fate of the Ottoman Greeks. Finally, Bloxham describes the fate of “Anatolian Greeks”—omitting mention of Thracian and other Ottoman Greeks—as nothing more than an act of “ethnic cleansing” (p. 106). Given Donald Bloxham’s admission that he had never studied the fate of Ottoman Greeks—an admission made long after he had written this book—it is evident that the book’s failings should be attributed to ignorance rather than any program of intelligent denial.
Source: Compiled for Greek-Genocide.org, 1 February 2009