Garegin Nzhdeh & Canadian Prof. Robert M. Cutler (Part I)
Due to technical reasons that we failed to resolve with Google, multiple interruptions in the sentences and paragraphs do exist. We apologize for the difficulty encountered by our readers.
For most Canadians and Armenians Prof. Robert Cutler is not a well known household name though his curriculum vitae is very impressive and it includes:
Multiple teaching and “Visiting Lecturer” positions in well known Canadian and European Universities. Research and close interest in the geo-economics of post-Soviet Eurasia with a strong focus on energy (oil) and natural resources (mining). Over two decades of experience consulting to governments, international institutions, civil-society organizations, think tanks, and the private sector. Last but not least a “Fellow” at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute (CGAI).
Officially, CGAI is “a registered charity, which comments repeatedly in the media and publishes extensively on defence, diplomacy, trade, resources, and development .” CGAI entertains the vision “To become the Canadian institute that government, the media, business and civil society, here and abroad, seek out for authoritative ideas on international relations.”
If you scrutinize closely the “Vision Statement” of CGAI, you will notice that there is no emphasis on the important point that the “authoritative ideas” peddled by The Institute since 2001 have been free of any bias and well balanced by a strong inclusion of the different versions of a political conflict. This means that CGAI is predisposed to act as a “hired gun” to protect the vested interests of multinational corporations controlling the world wide oil and gas industry, and unsavoury leaders sitting on vast oil reserves, plundering the state coffers, and buying respectability via “Caviar Diplomacy”- a forte of Ilham Aliyev.
The most worrisome aspect of CGAI and the writings its scholars disseminate, is the unreserved statement that “The Institute promotes active and effective Canadian global engagement while informing Canadians about the important link between prosperity, globalization and security.” Ironically, the Institute does not inform Canadians that the prosperity Canada enjoys today is deeply rooted in the British Colonial legacy that ruthlessly plundered the land, in the name of the “White Man’s Burden” to civilize “The Red Savages of Canada” a.k.a the native Indians.
Mr. Robert Cutler (RC) does not make any attempt, in the multiple articles he wrote since the end of The Second Artsakh War, to hide the fact that he is a staunch defender of Aliyev. It is very difficult to determine his motives. It may well be that the “Oil Industry” has an abundance of “Experts” and the saturated market cannot provide a decent living for Mr. Cutler. We can also entertain the possibility that with the lack of demands for “Experts” in the oil industry, Mr. Cutler has become a wandering “RONIN” trying to attract through “Yellow Journalism” the attention of a new Master such as Aliyev. Armenians interested in having a better understanding of the concept of “Yellow Journalism” can consult our article titled: “Why Armenian Journalists Are Not Paying Attention To Azeri Propaganda Efforts.”
Now that we introduced to our readers the man whose ideas and claims we decided to scrutinize, let us focus on the reasons that propelled us to challenge his views and to highlight the absurdities connected to his claims. It all started with an article titled “The Role of Armenia in French Elections” Mr. Cutler published on January 11, 2022.
Pretending to analyze the visit of Mr. Éric Zemmour, a candidate of the French Right challenging the current French President Emmanuel Macron in the upcoming French Presidential Election scheduled for April 2022, Mr. Cutler launches a long list of diatribes that he has been repeating time and again, in multiple articles published online, since November 2020.
Claim (A): The Armenian diaspora in France numbers roughly a half-million, equivalent to less than one percent of the total population. However, it has always had a place in the political calculations of the elite that is disproportionate to its size. (RC)
Reply: RC never managed to explain why the so called Armenian Diaspora in France that wields so much power on the French political elite, failed to gain from France an official recognition of Artsakh’s Independence. Obviously, if you lobby the French elite from 1994 to Sept. 2021 (27 years), and you fail to generate any form of recognition related to the status of Artsakh, you have no power. You only have a naive conviction that France will undermine its commercial interests with Azerbaijan and Turkey (billions of dollars) to support a cause that can generate ZERO revenue for the French economy. French leaders are not mentally deficient to shoot themselves in the foot. Armenian lobbyists in France are fool enough to waste time and effort on pipe dreams that reflect an absolute ignorance of “Realpolitik”- a game where actors/states will expediently ignore principles of morality in international affairs, whenever material advantages might be gained to enhance the power of The State.
Claim (B): The Armenian Diaspora, under the hegemony of the Dashnak Party (ARF), the “Karabakh Clan” (of former presidents Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan), and the Armenian Military Industrial Complex are closely cooperating with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to destabilize Armenia and pave the way for a new war with Azerbaijan.
Reply: We are not going to dignify the absurdity of such a claim with an answer. But we will remind our readers that Turkey, for over two decades, helped Iran in circumventing all the Western sanctions imposed on The Islamic Republic. Turkey played a major role in the advances scored, during the last three decades, by the Iranian Industrial Military Complex. Turkey modernized single-handedly The Air force of the Ayatollahs. For more details read “US Diplomatic Bullying of Armenia & Willful Blindness of Turkish Abuses (Part II)”
Claim (C): “...it is known from professional public-opinion surveys that Armenia is the second-most antisemitic country in Europe.”
Reply: It is a disgrace for an academic of Prof. Cutler’s calibre to place Armenia on the European continent. Armenia has no common borders with any European country. I guess when you are overworked and under-payed, the geographical position of a country doesn’t have any relevance to the stories you are confabulating.
While writing his article, Mr. Cutler in a moment of “Selective Amnesia” decided to set aside concrete numbers gathered by Kantor Center at Tel Aviv University and European Jewish Congress on antisemitism, and proceeded with the use of subjective “Public-Opinion Surveys”. Cutler also forgets that Canadian Universities up to this day teach undergraduate courses in public opinion manipulation, and how to lie with statistics. This means, if you contact 400 Turks residing in Denmark and solicit their opinions on antisemitism with loaded questions that bring you closer to your political agenda, you will manage to label Armenia as the second-most antisemitic country in Europe.
Unfortunately the Kantor Center and the European Jewish Congress figures based on real acts of antisemitisn (not opinions) do not agree with the conclusion of Mr. Cutler. Here are the figures: “Following the United States (with 100 incidents) on the list of serious incidents is the United Kingdom (with 68 incidents), France and Germany (with 35 incidents each) and Canada (20 incidents).” Armenia had one single incident of graffiti painting on a Holocaust Memorial located in a park in Yerevan, at the end of The Second Artsakh War.
Also had Mr. Cutler made any effort to consult the annual figures released by The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), he would have shared the same alarming concern expressed by B’nai Brith Canada: A yearly rise of 16.5% in antisemitic activities, for the three consecutive years ending in 2019. Obviously B’nai Brith cannot cover the high cost of consulting a luminary person of Mr. Cutler’s calibre to assess the prevalence of antisemitism worldwide. Petro dictator Aliyev can reward him generously for the mudslinging tactics he adopts to tarnish the reputation of Armenia.
Claim (C): The government of Armenia (Nikol Pashinyan) is under siege by an ideology known as “Tseghakronism” ... reformulated in the early twentieth century by the Armenian Nazi collaborator Garegin Nzhdeh.
We are not going to bore our readers with intricate figures and numbers gleaned from the records of The Wehrmacht or The German High Command to explain who did what, and who made bigger contributions to the Nazi success during “Operation Barbarossa”, the code name assigned by Nazis to the invasion of The Soviet Union. We will simply highlight several important points and then move on to the greatest treachery of WWII, perpetuated by Turkey against The Allied forces fighting Nazi Germany. The same Turkish perfidy massively increased the number of Jews who perished in the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Buchenwald and others, yet today no one dares to talk about it.
The combined number of the Armenian Legion, integrated into the Nazi battalions, under the command of Garegin Nzhdeh and Drastamat Kanayan (Dro), did not exceed 30,000. Slightly more than 20% of the soldiers (7,000) were assigned to road construction tasks, logistical support, and other non-combat duties. Of the remaining 23,000 soldiers, none of the field battalions they were assigned to, were involved in any Blitzkriegs operations that, by any stretch of imagination, turned the tide of the war in favour of the Nazi Army. Almost all Armenian soldiers on combat assignments were confined to protecting territories conquered by The Third Reich.
What prevented The Armenian Legion from having a serious combat role in the battle theatres of WWII, was Hitler’s twisted logic in assessing the “Trustworthiness” of the different races integrated into his army. According to American Jewish Historian Dallin Alexander, the author of “German Rule in Russia: 1941-1945: A Study of Occupation Policies.” (1957) , Hitler often reiterated his doubts about Armenian loyalty by arguing: "I don't know about these Georgians. They do not belong to the Turkic peoples...I consider only the Moslims to be reliable...All others I deem unreliable. For the time being I consider the formation of these battalions of purely Caucasian peoples very risky, while I don't see any danger in the establishment of purely Moslim units...In spite of all declarations from [Alfred Ernst] Rosenberg and the military, I don't trust the Armenians either."
According to Israeli historian Yair Auron, author of a book published back in 2000 titled “The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide”, The Armenian Legion saved the lives of dozens of Jewish Red Army POWs, who also relied on The Armenian Legion to establish contact with the Dutch underground and thus avoid a guaranteed death in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.
The Azerbaijani Legion of The Nazi Army had 70,000 soldiers enjoying a high level of trust from Hitler and The German High Command. Many units joined the Waffen-SS (Armed SS), and engaged in joint operations involving the arrest and deportation of Jewish civilians targeted all over occupied Europe.
Under the command of Major Abdurrahman Fatalibeyli, 700 Azerbaijani soldiers defended Berlin during the final weeks WWII. Fatalibeyli surrendered to The Allies after the fall of Berlin. The Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of The CIA, classified him as a valuable intelligence asset because of his experience on the Eastern Front and the countless battles he fought against The Red Soviet Army. He lived in Munich dividing his anti communist exploits between CIA-funded Radio Liberty and helping Major General Reinhard Gehlen, recruited by The CIA to contain the spread of communism in Soviet occupied European countries. On November 24, 1954 the body of Fatalibeyli was discovered garroted by agents of The KGB.
After a very close scrutiny of the contributions of Major Abdurrahman Fatalibeyli, to the war efforts of Nazi Germany and its obsession with the extermination of European Jewry, one can safely conclude that he looks like an altar boy compared to the monstrosities committed by The Republic of Turkey during WWII.
Not only did Turkey refused to declare war on Nazi Germany, but Turkish diplomats made it clear to the rulers of The Third Reich that Turkey was ready to cooperate with the Axis powers and provide vital raw materials badly needed by Germany to sustain the production of all kinds of military hardware. On June 18,1941 Turkey signed the “German-Turkish Friendship Agreement”.
Following the signature of the “German-Turkish Friendship Agreement”, Turkey made a firm commitment to export to Nazi Germany 45,000 tons of chromite ore in 1941, 45,000 tons in 1942, and 90,000 tons of the mineral in both 1943 and 1944. And this is what The U.S. State Department had to say about the Turkish largess with Nazi Germany:
“ [In] 1943, Turkey supplied almost 100 percent of German war needs in chromite, and as late as 1944, between 50 percent and 65 percent. Albert Speer, who was the armaments minister for Hitler wrote in his memoirs that he told Hitler in November 1943 -- and these are his words to Hitler -- "should supplies from Turkey be cut off, the stockpile of chromium is sufficient for only five to six months. The manufacture of planes, tanks, motor vehicles, tank shells, U-boats, almost the entire gamut of artillery would have to cease from one to three months after this deadline, since by then the reserves and distribution channels would be used up."
In other words Turkey’s refusal to prevent vital raw materials from reaching the Nazi Military Industrial Complex, meant millions of Europeans, including Jews who perished in the concentration camps of Europe, lost their lives because Turkish greed knew no limit.
It is also a well known fact to historians, diplomats, and intelligence agencies, that The Reichsbank (Central Bank of Nazi Germany) deposited in the Turkish Central Bank several tons of gold looted by the German Army from countries invaded during the different phases of military operations in Europe, and gold confiscated from Jewish Holocaust victims (gold watches, pendants, gold teeth extracted from dead Jewish bodies before being cremated.)
A small portion was recovered by the Tripartite Gold Commission (TGC) established by the Allies to return the Nazi looted gold to the rightful owners. Though the total number of gold transfers was well known to the TGC, Turkey relied on delay tactics to stall the efforts of the TGC, and finally refused to hand over to The Commission a substantial amount of the gold sitting in The Turkish Central Bank.
By simply being the first Muslim country to recognize the legitimacy of The State of Israel in 1949, and joining NATO in 1952 when The Cold War was gaining serious momentum, Turkey blackmailed Israel and The West with the following threat:
Lose a desperately needed ally (Turkey) to contain Soviet expansion in The Middle East, or remain determined to recollect all the Nazi gold fortune under Turkish control, and pay a prohibitive price for Western intransigence.
At the end of 1952, new geopolitical conditions forced The Allied Governments and The State of Israel to relinquish all claims related to every German asset under Turkish control since the collapse of The Third Reich.
Israel’s political establishment, under the leadership of PM David Ben-Gurion, had to chose the lesser of all the evils it was facing in the early infancy of The State of Israel. a) Betray the memory of 6,000,000 Jews who perished in The Holocaust by shaking hands with the Turks who provided vital support for the war machine of Nazi Germany.
b) Reject the new Turkish Alliance with Israel, badly needed to neutralize the threat of 200 million Arabs ready and willing to dump the Israeli population back into the sea.
c) Accept that before you can coexist with the evils perpetrated by Turkey during WWII, you have to EXIST as an independent State.
In the end, to safeguard the EXISTENCE of The State of Israel during the Cold War, Ben-Gurion accepted to swallow the bitter pill of The Turkish Israeli Alliance, and decided to pave the way for a close cooperation with Turkey that went very well, until Erdogan surfaced on the Turkish political landscape.
Unavoidably, before closing Part I of our article, we need to devote some space to the Canadian contributions to the slaughter of thousands of Jewish refugees seeking asylum in Canada, prior to and during Nazi military campaigns in Europe.
Before attacking Nzhdeh and blowing Armenian antisemitism out of proportion, had Prof. Robert Cutler sat down and spent some time listening to Rabbi Adam Cutler, the spiritual leader of Beth Tzedec Congregation, one of the oldest Jewish Congregations in Toronto, ON that traces back its origins to 1883, he would have heard the names of Irving Abella and Harold Troper, two Canadian authors who published in 1982 a book titled “None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948”
The book covers the horrific journey of SS St. Louis that left the German port of Hamburg in May 1939, with 907 Jewish refugees fleeing the atrocities of Nazi Germany. Initially, bound for Cuba, the ship was forced to leave Havana after Cuban authorities refused to issue landing permits for the passengers. Canadian authorities were approached, but PM William Lyon Mackenzie King, who won the elections four years earlier, refused to intervene and accept the Jewish refugees, arguing that Canada was fighting an uphill battle to recover from the “Great Depression” and the country could not accommodate a huge number of refugees without triggering riots and serious unrest in major Canadian cities.
In the end, SS St. Louis had to sail back to Europe. Of the 907 Jewish passengers, slightly more than 300 managed to find temporary refuge in England, France, Belgium, and Holland. “About 500 of them ended up back in Germany, where 254 were killed in concentration and internment camps.” From 1933 to 1945, the U.S. allowed in more than 200,000 European Jewish refugees; while Canada accepted slightly more than 5,000. Thousands of those Jewish Refugees fleeing Europe and rejected by Canada perished because of Canadian antisemitism.
In November 2018, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau issued a formal apology in The House of Commons to The Jewish Community of Canada. He pointed out that “To harbour such hatred and indifference towards the Jewish refugees was to share in the moral responsibility for their deaths. We apologize to the 907 German Jews aboard the MS. St-Louis, as well as their families. We also apologize to others who paid the price of our inaction, whom we doomed to the ultimate horror of the death camps.”
Israeli historian, Nazi-hunter, and Holocaust scholar Dr. Efraim Zuroff has stressed in his writings and comments made to the Western media that “Nzhdeh had indeed collaborated with the Nazis as one of the commanders of the Armenian Legion in Crimea and the Caucasus” but he found no evidence in his extensive research that the Armenian Legion participated in any atrocities during the Holocaust.
Of course no matter how much evidence we introduce to prove that antisemitism, expressed by a handful of nondescript Armenians living in Armenia, was never a threat to the small Jewish community of Armenia, Aliyev and Prof. Cutler will not believe us.
What is a serious threat to the stability of The Caucasus, and possibly to the entire stability of The Middle East, is the racially motivated supremacist ideology of Pan-Turkism and Pan-Turanism currently pursued by Turkey, motivated by the destructive obsession of reviving the glory of The Ottoman Empire. But Prof. Robert Cutler will never address such issues, because he is not ready to bite the hands that are feeding him (Aliyev) in the name of adopting higher standards of academic integrity.
In Part II of our article we will cover Hitler’s fascination with Ataturk. The admiration the Nazi leader had for Ataturk’s patriotic wars to eliminate all minorities in Turkey that were tainting the purity of the newly established Turkish Republic in 1923. We will provide evidence that Ataturk encouraged his adoptive daughter Ayşe Afet İnan, to continue her studies in Switzerland and explore the racial origins and superiority of “The Real Turk”. We will address Erdogan’s antisemitic policies, Israel’s reluctance to challenge Erdogan’s views and the appeasement tactics adopted by The State of Israel in the name of protecting the national interests of The State.
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