Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir

Peter begins to discuss the history of conflict between Turkish authorities and Armenians, the details drawn from a book he reads the summer before graduate school about the American Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau.

The early era of massacring Armenians came at the end of the 19th century following changing jurisdictional policies wrought by the Russo-Turkish War in 1877 and 1878. The Russian victors bowed out of a role as protectors of Christian Armenians against the standing, brutal Turkish sultan, Abdul Hamid II. Protests for basic civil rights angered the sultan into mass murder—“by the end of 1896, more than 200,000 Armenians had been killed” (157). The unchecked bloody era became “a prologue to what would happen to the Armenians in 1915” (157).

In the early decades of the 20th century, a new wave of ruling authorities focused on expelling Greeks from parts of Anatolia on the Aegean Sea. The Turkish State started relocating Christian ethnic minorities to sequestered provinces. Reading about Turkish disdain for Christian minorities in the region reminds the author forcibly of the Third Reich’s assault on Jews. He says, “the parallels in history are frightening” (160). 

By 1915, a nationalist government actively strived to create “a Turkish nation based on racial purity, ‘Turkey for the Turks’” (163).