As far as this debate goes, let’s accept that the Torossian debates have come to an end with my piece that was published in T24. I showed without question that there was an Armenian officer named Sarkis Torossian and that he fought for the Ottoman Army. Even if his memoir contained information that was exaggerated or wrong in places, in the end he was telling us about his own life and that much of this story should be considered finished.

Still, it seems like there is just one issue left over from the first stage of the debate. In a note to Halil Berktay, Hakan Erdem expressed his doubts over a document belonging to Torossian, that I had published. The document in question is Torossian’s military draft and health record from 1942. I had claimed that Hakan Erdem had published the wrong document as an “unfortunate act” thinking it was Torossian’s and I had presented another document as the correct one. The importance of all this is that in the document that I published the words “scar on left side of head” appear. In his memoir, Torossian had stated that in November 1916 he had been injured on the left side of his head in Romania. Placed alongside the other documents that I had published, this document showed that the claim that Torossian had entered the US in 1916 was a tale made up by Hakan Erdem.

On the Subject of the Culture of Debate

Hakan Erdem insists that the document he published is correct and accuses me of presenting a document whose origins are unknown, without attributing a source. But the issue doesn’t just end here. Based on Hakan Erdem’s informational note, Halil Berktay continues with “…I want to emphasize that this is a very serious charge. If it’s true, no one can get away with this…This strikes right at the heart of scholarly ethics and is a direct violation. Things like this, for example, the equivalent in the natural sciences would be the knowing falsification of research and experiment results. They couldn’t care less how sorry you are, especially in American universities. There are plenty of precedents. They’ll close down all of your projects; shut down your laboratories; during the investigation they will walk you out of the office and prohibit you from stepping back inside; depending on how serious the incident is, even if you’re tenured, you can be shown the door for ‘moral turpitude’”.

After accusing me of “knowingly falsifying a document” and “moral turpitude”, I don’t know if Mr. Berktay didn’t stop there and went ahead to demand in writing that I be “shown the door” at the university where I work. But in his other writings on the subject, he doesn’t hesitate to make the debate personal and directs plenty of insults in my direction. Of course, none of what he says deserves to be responded with in similar fashion. It isn’t me who set the tone and language of this exchange.

Where did Hakan Erdem Make his Mistake?

If you look closer, there’s a strange side to the disrespectfulness directed at me. The reader should be made aware of the fact that in the end, this isn’t a disagreement over “historiography” or “falsification of documents”. The problem is really quite simple and it’s about downloading documents properly from the internet. What Hakan Erdem calls “historiography” consisted of becoming a member of a site called www.ancestry.com, and downloading some documents related to Torossian from there. As for the information found on Captain Torossian’s military draft and health record from the Second World War, which is the subject of this argument, it can be found at the same site.

Hakan Erdem became a member of the site, entered Sarkis Torossian’s name and related information and believing that the documents that popped up belonged to Torossian, he published them. Because the site requires payment to access it, showing you what Erdem’s mistake was would be difficult. However, I can show you what happened through another site that is free and that presents the same documents. In order to understand Hakan Erdem’s error you will need to look at the document numbered 227. If you open this link you will see two different documents that I have published below. The first document contains Torossian’s identification information; the second document shows no name but gives some health related information about what should be the individual (Torossian) identified in the first document. These are the two documents that Hakan Erdem published and identified as belonging to Sarkis Torossian.

However, there’s something a little odd about the second document, the one that doesn’t have a name and which lists physical characteristics claimed to be about Torossian. The stamp at the bottom of the document is from a town called Glassport, in Allegheny County, in the state of Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Torossian lived in Philadelphia, in a different county in Pennsylvania. When Hakan Erdem published all the military draft records of Torossian’s brothers he should have picked up on this because all of the siblings lived, not only in the same city, but in the same area of the city. But, Hakan Erdem did not notice this. In addition, the individual’s physical characteristics are listed as: blue eyes, brown hair, pink cheeked and freckled. For an Armenian from Anatolia, these are physical characteristics that we don’t see very often. (see document 227)

Despite having detected something odd about this document that Hakan Erdem had published, since it didn’t carry much importance as far as the subject of debate was concerned, I didn’t spend much time pondering over it and didn’t feel the need to go to the internet site and check it for myself. This was true up until the time when I obtained the citizenship records and family photographs of Torossian from Torossian’s granddaughter, Louise Schreiber. At the time that Torossian applied for citizenship, his physical characteristics had been listed in the documents. Not a single word about blue eyes, freckles, pink cheeks etc. was on the document. Also, the family photos that Louise Schreiber presented of Torossian showed nothing of an individual with blue eyes or freckles.

Based on this, I went to the webpage that Hakan Erdem had pulled the document from and was able to easily see where the mistake had been made. At the bottom of the web address where the documents had been downloaded, was a warning note directed at the reader: “Note regarding the images for the states of DE [Delaware], MD [Maryland], PA [Pennsylvania] and WV [West Virginia]: these four states were microfilmed at the National Archives in such a way that the back of one person’s draft card appears in the same image as the front of the next individual’s card. Thus, when viewing the scanned image of each person’s original draft card you will see the correct front side of each person’s draft card, but the back side of the previous person’s card. The draft cards for states other than Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and West Virginia were microfilmed in a different manner and thus images of the original draft cards from those other states display correctly in the database.” (Record 1)

In other words, the website in question explains quite clearly the issue that needs to be paid attention to when downloading documents. When the draft cards were scanned in the microfilm, the sequence was misfiled and researchers need to pay special attention to this.

Again, it’s possible to show what happened from the documents that are numbered 226, 227 and 228 at the website I mention above.

Based upon the explanation that was given, the information that appears in the nameless record that appears alongside the page on Sarkis Torossian, are not about Torossian. This information pertains to John Toroski which appears on the previous page (Image 226). It’s possible to see and understand this by looking at the documents. In the address portion of the card which gives information about John Toroski, not only do you see the abbreviated county name of Allegheny but at the very bottom you’ll see that the mark (X) between the names John and Toroski was witnessed by Margaret S. Faherty. (Record 2)

If you look at the nameless health card record published above, which supposedly belongs to Torossian, you will see the County of Allegheny and the name Margaret S. Faherty (Record 1). Following this, it is logical that Torossian’s correct health related information appears in the page of the records of the person named Demetrius Torous, who follows him (Image 228) (Record 3).

As can be seen on the record, the statement “scar on left side of head” appears on the nameless health card of Torossian and so does the address of Philadelphia. This site, where the records are available for free, also warns researchers to be aware of the confusion. (Record 4).

As I said, the matter is quite clear and all it has to do with is carefully reading what is written on the internet site where the records are downloaded. If those who address me had bothered to read the web pages in front of them with care instead of throwing insults my way, none of this would have been necessary.

Conclusion: Again on Culture of Debate

In my article about Torossian, the one that caused the launch of personal attacks against me, I had not made a big issue of what was an obvious error on Hakan Erdem’s part. It was mentioned in a footnote as “unfortunate”, that’s all. If I may say so, I had treated Hakan Erdem’s mistake with understanding and had not turned the debate into something personal that would demean him. Nevertheless, the record was extremely important because it supported what Torossian had described about Romania and it showed that it was impossible for him to have traveled to America in 1916. If I had wanted to I could have turned this into something much bigger. In fact I could have made it the headline of my article and claimed that Hakan Erdem had acted intentionally. I could have stated that what Hakan Erdem was up to wasn’t “historiography” but rather “Google historiography” and he couldn’t even get that right. I could have embarrassed him by stating that he can’t even read a website correctly nor download a document with any success. I did not do any of these. It’s obvious that I made a choice not to.

My point here isn’t to turn this debate into something personal by writing about everything I could have said but didn’t. I apologize in advance for any statement that could be interpreted that way. I bring this up here in order to show the level of reaction and insult that spewed forth from those who were addressing me for a serious error that was not even mentioned in the body of my article. In other words, I am trying to underline the difference between the way I have conducted myself versus those who have addressed me. It has everything to do with the culture of debate and what is clear is that what others consider and understand to be a debate is nothing other than the art of insult. If I were to state that the one other thing that ended with the Torossian debates is the ethos of debate between academics, I don’t think this would be an exaggeration.

There’s an issue that I just can’t wrap my head around and have a really difficult time processing. As I said, the issue isn’t really about historiography but about downloading documents from the internet. If Hakan Erdem and I are looking at the same website and if we’re observing the same documents that we believe pertain to Torossian, why would I engage in obvious fraud, an act that I would be caught red handed at? Truly, how could they really believe that I could be guilty of such a commonplace act of fraud? Don’t Hakan Erdem and Halil Berktay know that I have been working in the field of Armenian genocide studies since the 1990s? If you have been working on the subject area of the Armenian genocide, you need to know one thing. Those who are in opposition to you will view document falsification and fraud as legitimate. In fact, this is their modus operandi; this is how they ‘roll’. But you on the other hand, don’t have the right to make one small mistake, not one. They’ve got zero tolerance for you. Make one small mistake and they will be on you very quickly and you’ll be hit with every kind of verbal assault imaginable. As I said, they’re free to make mistakes….

Because of its significance, I had written many times about this “zero tolerance” issue. One of the examples had to do with what happened to me when I recounted that Mustafa Kemal had called the genocide “fazahat” (shameful act). I was called a fraud and made the target of attacks. In the response that I gave on the subject, these were my exact words “It’s been said that ‘it’s human to make mistakes’. No doubt, I and other social scientists in my position are capable of making mistakes. However, especially in Turkey, because of the extremely ‘sensitive’ character of the subject matter, we know that we work in an environment of ‘zero tolerance’; that the tolerance shown towards others is not extended to us and that in the face of even the smallest of errors, we can be strung up. If it must be repeated, the seriousness with which our ideas are taken, depends on the fastidiousness with which we cite our sources.”¹ It is upsetting for me, to see Hakan Erdem and Halil Berktay behave in a similar manner as those who defend the official state position. If only Haken Erdem had asked me what I meant by the expression “unfortunate”.

What I have to say about the Torossian debates and Hakan Erdem’s book is this. Any history book written over a span of 2.5 months that is based upon Google searches will not have a shelf life that’s much more than 2.5 months. I hope this is Erdem’s last attempt at writing history with shortcuts. I also recommend that he give some serious thoughts on why the Turkish media showed such intense interest over his book, which was full of such serious errors but remained silent over my critiques (with the exception of Engin Ardıç).

My final words are a small piece of advice directed at students of social science, in particular, history. Internet should never be your sole source of information but if you are going to download documents from websites, never neglect to read the site and document carefully from beginning to end. Even more importantly, if you are going to be working in the field of mass violence like genocide, do not even think of putting pen to paper, until you have spoken with the survivors or with the close relatives of those who were killed. Take their documentation seriously and give what they have to say the importance it deserves. Failing that, you’ll end up in the same place that Haken Erdem and Halil Berktay have fallen into.

¹ Radikal, 12 November 2006, http://www.radikal.com.tr/ek_haber.php?ek=r2&haberno=6431 ↩