Foehammer’s Anvil

There’s been a question burning way in the back of my brain now for many months: “What happened to the History Channel’s documentary, ‘Ottoman Empire: The War Machine’ “?

To get you all up to speed, let’s first reflect back to when I first noticed this mystery developing. It all began with the following posting here June 18, 2006, The History Channel: Iran - The Next Iraq?, at the end of which I mentioned:

Also, I noticed they have a segment coming up that many readers here will probably want to tune into:

‘Ottoman Empire: The War Machine’

Airs on June 22nd, 8 PM EST.

No, I don’t work for the History Channel. LOL.

June 22nd came. No “Ottoman Empire” special was televised or released, prompting this posting from me:

I must be in the Twilight Zone, but I can find no reference tonight to the ‘Ottoman Empire: The War Machine’ that was originally scheduled to air tonight on the History Channel.

At this point I could not sit still and I wrote an email to The History Channel. On June 23rd I made the following posting in regard to the response I received:

Ok, I could not help myself. I wrote an email to the History Channel and I asked why exactly that the ‘Ottoman Empire: The War Machine’ special was not aired as scheduled. Yes, you are reading my mind — I was thinking perhaps some outside pressure (cough, cough) was administered to keep it from seeing the light of day. Here is the response I received in my email this morning:

Thank you for your interest in The History Channel program OTTOMAN EMPIRE: THE WAR MACHINE. We will be rescheduling this documentary, which was scheduled to premiere on Thursday June 22 at 8PM, because the program was not completed in time for air. We appreciate your continued support.

Regards, Viewer Relations

Ok, Viewer Relations. I’ll be waiting patiently.

And I have waited patiently. It’s been almost 10 months to the day, in fact. And still I never heard of a DVD release or television premiere of ‘Ottoman Empire: The War Machine’. But I have found this very curious reference to the missing History Channel special:

Disappearing History Documentary “Ottoman Empire”

Documentary by History Channel, “Ottoman Empire: The War Machine” mysteriously disappeared from the network’s schedule June 22, the day it was to premiere. The program recounts the six-century reign of the Ottomans, the precursors to the present-day Turkey. When the special did not premiere, even after History had run promos just days before and pre-sold DVDs on its Website, message boards and blogs erupted with allegations the network caved to pressure from the Turkish government or other groups. Although none have seen the documentary, the critics suspect it likely covers the death of more than a million Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Turks from 1915 to 1923.

Still not ready to be convinced that the documentary simply got filed somewhere in Area 51, I kept digging through Google. And then I found references to a rescheduled premiere that escaped me, August 26th, 2006. Annoyingly, I never received an email from the History Channel to inform me of this airing.

But more than that, I stumbled upon a site dedicated what it calls “The Tall Armenian Tale: The Falsified Genocide”, tallarmeniantale.com.

Can you say “history revisionists”, boys and girls?

There’s an entire page on ‘Tall Armenian Tale’ dedicated to this mysterious History Channel documentary and that really set off a red flag. I can’t help but wonder if the History Channel claims that the special was not ready for airing back in June of 2006 are actually false and that instead the documentary was re-edited to bend to public pressure from pro-Turkish groups like the one obviously running ‘Tall Armenian Tale’. Here’s the mention of the History Channel special from this page:

“The Ottoman War Machine” is a two hour documentary spanning the reign of the Ottoman Empire, debuting in August 26, 2006 on the History Channel. Narrated by Powers Booth (whose voice was spectacular, as a Roman in ATTILA THE HUN), the film was also written by Doc Jarden (who was a producer on “Court TV” and “The Tyra Banks Show”), and directed by Robert Kirk…who also co-produced, along with co-producers David Cargill and Rob Lihani.

According to the credits, this was a totally independent American production. The only Turkish crew names, aside from one for visual effects, was from segments shot in Turkey. “Researchers” were also Turkish.

Advance word was that this would be a refreshingly “fair” show, with emphasis on historical facts, and not the typical bigoted sensationalism. Indeed, when the show was postponed from early summer, some in the Turkish-American community feared that Armenian & Greek extremist pressure might have caused the History Channel to buckle under. If there is anything “fair” about Turkey in the American media, these hateful groups are always at the ready to try and shoot it down.

Yet the “Ottoman War Machine” did make it to the airwaves, fairly and accurately documenting Ottoman history, beginning with Osman’s humble beginnings. When Constantinople was captured, we were told that the city was renamed “Istanbul.” We were told the Imperial Harem was designed toward reproduction of the royal line, and not sexual thrills. The onscreen spokespeople, many whose names were new to me, came from the perspective of legitimate truth and history. One accorded generous screen time was Dr. Heath Lowry, so I knew we were in good hands.

Now, isn’t that a very curious statement I highlighted above? While you’ve already seen earlier in this article that a pro-Armenian group on the Net was worried that the producers of “Ottoman War Machine” caved into Turkish pressure when it did not originally air, now the pro-Turkish group has claimed that the producers caved into Armenian and Greek pressure.

Where does the truth in all this and the actual history lie? I’ll admit that I’m simply not in the know when it comes to this part of history. I have not studied Armenia to any great length, but I’ve heard the stories of genocide and atrocities at the hands of the Turks. I’ve read a handful of accounts. Could all these stories be fabrications?

I’m doubtful that the stories of Armenian genocide are false. The people that have put together “Tall Armenian Tale” just seem to protest too much and I’m very strongly reminded of a certain fellow that’s the president of Iran that continues to deny the Jewish Holocaust. And we know that to deny that is an insane lie. I have met American World War II veterans that witnessed the victims of that horrible era firsthand.

Denial at “Tall Armenian Tale” seems to be the order of the day. Here’s a bit in reference to “The Ottoman War Machine”:

I could sense as soon as mention of the Armenians began, the very nature of the production took a 180 degree turn. It was as though we were watching a psychological thriller or any kind of a drama, and then we were hit with an incongruous comedy or cartoon. The spokespeople, for one, vanished, and the script took over. The transcript of the Armenian chapter:

Here apparently follows part of a transcript from the documentary itself (I’d love to get a complete copy):

Some (in the Balkans) were successful in gaining independence from the Ottoman Empire. But this was not the case of the Christian Armenian minority who had lived in the region for 3,000 years. By early in the First World War, 1915, at a time when the Ottoman Empire was shrinking and besieged from all sides, the ultra-nationalist group in power, known as the Young Turks, was trying to restore the glory of their declining empire by uniting all Turkish-speaking people in the empire and beyond.

The Armenians came under siege, when in the spring of 1915, the Young Turks ordered a forced deportation of one-and-three-quarter million ethnic Armenians out of Anatolia into Syria and Mesopotamia.

The story of why and what happened is, nearly a century later, controversial, emotional, and hotly debated. To the Turks, the deportations were ordered because some Armenians were allying themselves with Russia, Turkey’s enemy to the east. To the Armenians, this was a pretext. The deportations were ordered out of a desire to rid Turkey of Armenians forever.

During the evacuation, a forced march of hundreds of miles, hundreds of thousands of men. women and children, died of starvation and massacre. Newspaper reports of the time tell of horrific scenes of rape and murder. Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador to Turkey later wrote, “I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this.”

Estimates of total Armenian death in the period of the evacuations range from 300,000 to a million-and-a-half. The Turks acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died but they and some historians maintain that these deaths were the result of war-caused starvation, civil unrest, and ethnic conflict. To Armenians and many historians, the actions were a clear action of genocide committed by the Ottomans, and today has been recognized as such by many countries.

Well, if much of this is true, I can certainly see why pro-Turkish and Islamic groups would want to deny it. Unfortunately, even as I skim the surface of this period of history, too many scholars would seem to be siding with the Armenians and Greeks in this to be denied. Here for example, from the new Islam 101 section of Jihad Watch comes this eye-opening group of related paragraphs:

Following its defeat at the walls of Vienna in 1683, Islam entered a period of strategic decline in which it was increasingly dominated by the rising European colonial powers. Due to its material weakness vis-a-vis the West, dar al-Islam was unable to prosecute large-scale military campaigns into infidel territory. The Islamic Empire, then ruled by the Ottoman Turks, was reduced to fending of the increasingly predatory European powers.

In 1856, Western pressure compelled the Ottoman government to suspend the dhimma under which the Empire’s non-Muslim subjects labored. This provided hitherto unknown opportunities for social and personal improvement by the former dhimmis, but it also fomented resentment by orthodox Muslims who saw this as a violation of the Sharia and their Allah-given superiority over unbelievers.

By the late 19th century, tensions among the European subjects of the Empire broke out into the open when the Ottoman government massacred 30,000 Bulgarians in 1876 for allegedly rebelling against Ottoman rule. Following Western intervention that resulted in Bulgarian independence, the Ottoman government and its Muslim subjects were increasingly nervous about other non-Muslim groups seeking independence.

It was in this atmosphere that the first stage of the Armenian genocide took place in 1896 with the slaughter of some 250,000 Armenians. Both civilians and military personnel took place in the massacres. Peter Balakian, in his book, The Burning Tigris, documents the whole horrific story. But the massacres of the 1890s were only the prelude to the much larger holocaust of 1915, which claimed some 1.5 million lives. While various factors contributed to the slaughter, there is no mistaking that the massacres were nothing other than a jihad waged against the Armenians, no longer protected as they were by the dhimma. In 1914, as the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the central powers, an official anti-Christian jihad was proclaimed.

To promote the idea of jihad, the sheikh-ul-Islam’s {the most senior religious leader in the Ottoman Empire} published proclamation summoned the Muslim world to arise and massacre its Christian oppressors. ‘Oh Moslems,’ the document read, ‘Ye who are smitten with happiness and are on the verge of sacrificing your life and your good for the cause of right, and of braving perils, gather now around the Imperial throne.’ In the Ikdam, the Turkish newspaper that had just passed into German ownership, the idea of jihad was underscored: ‘The deeds of our enemies have brought down the wrath of God. A gleam of hope has appeared. All Mohammedans, young and old, men, women, and children must fulfill their duty. ‘ If we do it, the deliverance of the subjected Mohammedan kingdoms is assured.’ ‘ ‘He who kills even one unbeliever,’ one pamphlet read, ‘of those who rule over us, whether he does it secretly or openly, shall be rewarded by God.’ (quoted in Balakian, The Burning Tigris, 169-70.)

The anti-Christian jihad culminated in 1922 at Smyrna, on the Mediterranean coast, where 150,000 Greek Christians were massacred by the Turkish army under the indifferent eye of Allied warships. All in, from 1896-1923, some 2.5 million Christians were killed, the first modern genocide, which to this day is denied by the Turkish government.

So, now I’d like to, for a change, put this before my reading audience. I’m sure many of you must have more knowledge of the subject of Armenian genocide than I do. And I’m hopeful that someone may have seen the documentary in question, perhaps has a copy of it on DVD even. I want to get information and opinions here. In fact, I’m wondering if perhaps I should dedicate a section of my new forums strictly to Armenian/Christian and Jewish genocide at the hands of Muslims, because this is very important to understand and discuss in an objective manner.

Do you believe the documentary in question was pulled to be re-edited to soften its tone to please pro-Turkish groups? Have you seen other evidence of such behavior on the part of the History Channel or any other major television channels, magazines or newspapers or publishers? Do you believe that upwards of a million-and-a-half Armenians and Greeks were slaughtered by the jihadist Turks? Does anyone have links to more information and possibly purchase of “Ottoman Empire: The War Machine” or possibly “Ottoman War Machine” (the title seems to possibly have been revised)?

Comments, discussion and links please.