Guenter Lewy
Encyclopedia
Guenter Lewy is an author and political scientist who is a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts
. His works span several topics, but he is most often associated with his 1978 book on the Vietnam War
, America in Vietnam
, and several controversial works that deal with the applicability of the term genocide
to various historical events.
In 1939, he immigrated to Palestine and then to the United States
. He has been on the faculties of Columbia University
, Smith College
, and the University of Massachusetts
. He currently lives in Washington, D.C.
and is a frequent contributor to Commentary
.
s"), which he has suggested was important in shaping his desire for an academic career. Described by Lewy as a "quasi-Romantic" group, Die Greifen emphasized music, literature, and song, particularly Landsknecht
lieder, encouraging the youths to avoid becoming "Spiessburger" ("philistines
"). By 1938, as persecution of Jews in Germany increased, Lewy began to lobby his family to leave Germany behind. After Kristallnacht
, in November 1938, his family immigrated to Palestine
.
Later in the war, when Lewy was of fighting age, he voluntarily took up arms against Germany
, serving in the Jewish Brigade
.
's controversial play The Deputy
had appeared only a year earlier, indicting the Vatican for failing to act to save the Jews during the Holocaust; amidst the Vatican's outrage with the play, Lewy's text continued in the same vein:
The text received much praise, including that of Alfred Grosser, who characterized the text as a "terribly precise volume" which demonstrated that "all the documents show the Catholic Church cooperating with the Nazi regime".
The Vatican opted to answer the critical allegations by releasing a series of documents
aiming to refute the growing perception of the Vatican having been conniving in the Holocaust. One Jesuit priest answering Lewy's text on behalf of the Vatican suggested that Lewy's conclusions were based "not on the record but on a subjective conviction... This ready acceptance of a Nazi-inspired wartime legend is a measure of Lewy's inability to plumb the motives of Pius XII... There is no proof, in this book or anywhere else, that Pius XII thought Nazism was a 'bulwark' in defense of Christianity."
In the context of other historical works examining the legacy of the Vatican in the era of the Holocaust, Lewy's work has been described as "exceedingly harsh" but also seminal and well-received.
, published in 1978, would "clear away the cobwebs of mythology that inhibit the correct understanding of what went on -- and what went wrong -- in Vietnam." The text, which argues against traditional or "orthodox" interpretations of the war as an unnecessary, unjust, and/or unwinnable war replete with disastrous mistakes and widespread American atrocities, has proven influential for many western scholars that share similar views of the conflict. It predated and influenced other reinterpretations including those of Norman Podhoretz
, Mark Moyar, and Michael Lind
. America in Vietnam thus attracted both criticism and support of Lewy for belonging to the "revisionist" school on Vietnam. Lewy argues,
Lewy criticizes what he terms the “war crime industry”, and what he perceives to be the double standards of the Western media, which, he alleged, neglected to report equally on the crimes of Vietnamese communists, giving the figure of 36,725 political assassinations perpetrated by the VC/NVA between 1957 and 1972. About the crimes committed by US soldiers, Guenter Lewy asserts that “between January 1965 and March 1973, 201 Army personnel in Vietnam were convicted by court-martial of serious offenses against Vietnamese. During the period of March 1965 to August 1971, 77 Marines were convicted of serious crimes against Vietnamese.”
In recalling the 1971 congressional testimony of some US veterans who were critical of the war, one of whom compared US action in Vietnam to genocide
, Lewy suggests that some "witnesses sounded as if they had memorized North Vietnamese propaganda."
The book is broadly critical of domestic opponents of American participation in the Vietnam War. In using the phrases "peace activists" or "peace demonstrations", Lewy often puts quotation marks around the word "peace", implying alternative motivations for the activism. The author alleges a possible connection between cases of sabotage in the Navy and the anti-war movement:
The text was praised by Vietnam veteran and current US Senator Jim Webb
, Andrew J. Pierre of Foreign Affairs
, and by several newspapers, including The Economist, which described it as "in many way the best history of the war yet to appear". Critics included historians of the "orthodox" school as well as polemical critics such as linguist and famous Vietnam War opponent Noam Chomsky
. Chomsky, after being singled out for criticism by Lewy in the book, wrote that "every state has its Guenter Lewys". According to Chomsky, Lewy's "concept of the writing of moral-historical tracts... is misrepresentation of documents, uncritical regurgitation of government claims, and dismissal of annoying facts that contradict them, and [his] concept of morality is such as to legitimate virtually any atrocity against civilians once the state has issued its commands."
, became controversial in the context of the 2004 US Presidential Election. Presidential hopeful John Kerry
had been involved with the Winter Soldier Investigation; in the context of the campaign, Lewy's suggestion that the Winter Soldier Investigation was dishonest and politically motivated was frequently cited to impugn John Kerry's reputation.
Vietnam Veterans Against the War
, the group of which Kerry had been a part, alleged that American war policy and conduct in Vietnam was resulting in warcrimes being committed. Lewy suggests that the group used "fake witnesses" in the Winter Soldier hearing in Detroit, and that its allegations were formally investigated:
Government officials today have no record of any such Naval Investigative Service report, although they suggest that it could have been lost or destroyed. Lewy later said that he could not recall if he had actually seen the alleged report or simply been told of its contents. "I don't think Lewy is interested in presenting any of [the Winter Soldier testimony] as truthful," University of Richmond history professor Ernest Bolt told the Chicago Tribune
. "He has an angle on the war as a whole." Bolt said it is impossible to tell whether Lewy fairly characterized the naval investigative report because no other historian had seen it.
The book was praised by Saul Friedlander
, who called it "a work of great compassion and exemplary scholarship." According to Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg
, "Lewy's account of Nazi measures against the powerless Gypsies is unsurpassed in the English language." Henriette Asséo, lecturer at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales
(School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, Paris), specialist of Gypsy history, wrote that Guenter Lewy's book "requires humility, giving a new, considerable documentation", adding, however, that the rejection of "genocide" label can be "discussed" Hans Mommsen agreed totally with Guenter Lewy, including with the rejection of "genocide" qualification.
The book has also been singled out for criticism, particularly by Romani scholars, who believe that it blames the Roma people for their own massacre. Lewy's work has been criticized as a text which "overstates" the differences of the persecution of Jews and the persecution of Roma in the Nazi era, in a manner indicative of "the priorities of latter-day scholarship, about the way that the murder of the Jews has been promoted to obscure so much of the rest of the Nazi record of atrocity".
As to whether the American Indian experience resembles the fate of the Jews under the Nazi regime:
The paper is highly critical of Ward Churchill
, particularly in regards to his attributing the word "genocide" to the destruction of American Indian civilization. Lewy dismissed Churchill's assertion that the U.S. Army intentionally spread smallpox among American Indian
s by distributing infected blankets in 1837 as bogus.
regime organizing the massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. According to Professor Tessa Hoffmann of Berlin's Free University
, Lewy had conceived of the idea of writing on the Armenian Genocide as early as 2000:
In his book he states that the killings were not genocide, because they have not been proven to have been governmentally organized, and also because “the argument that the deportations in reality constituted a premeditated program of extermination of the Armenians of Turkey is difficult to square with many aspects and characteristics of the relocations”, including the non deportation of Armenian communities of cities like Istanbul, Smyrna (Izmir) and Aleppo; the fact that “the trek on foot that took so many lives was imposed only on the Armenian in eastern and central Anatolia, a part of the country that had no railroad. Although the one-spur Baghdad railway was overburdened with the transport of troops and supplies, the deportees from the western provinces and Cilicia who had the money were allowed to purchase ticket by rail and were spared at least some of the tribulations of the deportation process”; the “great deal of variation of variation” exhibitted by the resettlement process, “that depended on factors such as geography and the attitude of local officials”. According to Guenter Lewy, “the Ottoman government wanted to arrange an orderly process, but did not have the means to do so.”
About the number of Armenian victims, Guenter Lewy argues that it “can only be estimated, because no death statistics for this period exist”; calculating the total losses of Ottoman Armenians between 1914 and 1919, Guenter Lewy uses the figure of 1,750,000 individuals for the pre-war population in the whole Ottoman Empire, figure used by historians like Charles Dowsett
and Malcolm E. Yapp, then estimate the number of survivors in 1919 to around 1,108,000, making an average of several estimations, including the tabulation of George Montgomery (American official in the Paris peace conference in charge of Near East) and the figure of the Armenian National Council of Constantinople; so, Guenter Lewy estimates the total losses for World War I to around 642,000.
Lewy's research on this and related topics has been criticized by University of California, Davis
professor Keith David Watenpaugh
:
According to David B. MacDonald
, Lewy "actually denies the Armenian genocide in a manner similar to his denial of the American Indian and Roma genocides", and "while the sources he uses are either Turkish or pro-Turkish, Lewy insists that 'debate' is ongoing and there has been no resolution". MacDonald points out that sources like Kamuran Gurun and Bernard Lewis
"hardly demonstrate the existence of a genuine academic dispute".
According to the Intelligence Report journal of Southern Poverty Law Center
,
Mark Potok
, the editor of Intelligence Report, wrote that "Despite the efforts of people like Lewy—many of them funded by the Turkish government—the facts of the Armenian genocide are quite well known. The ruling party of the day massacred intellectuals, forced hundreds of thousands of Armenians into what amounted to death marches, and systematically despoiled the victims of their property. Professor Raphael Lemkin coined the word "genocide" in 1943 with the Armenian slaughter in mind. In 2005, the International Association of Genocide Scholars wrote the Turkish foreign minister to remind him that the massacre of Christian Armenians was indeed 'a systematic genocide'."
On November 17, 2008, Guenter Lewy filed a defamation suit against the Southern Poverty Law Center, Inc., and writer-editor David Holthouse in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
On September 28, 2010, the case was settled when the SPLC agreed to publish a retraction and apologize to Lewy, for suggesting that he was "a Turkish agent". In its statement, the SPLC stated that it had erred in assuming that "any scholar who challenges the Armenian genocide narrative necessarily has been financially compromised by the government of Turkey." The settlement with Lewy included an undisclosed monetary payment. Lewy's council in the case, David Salzman and Bruce Fein
, lead the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund.
About the vote of IAGS, Guenter Lewy wrote:
According to Joseph Albert Kechichian
, writing in the International Journal of Middle East Studies
,:
Writing in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Professor of Political Science Michael Gunter has argued that the fact that Lewy's book was distributed free to libraries does not demonstrate that the argument of the book is somehow illegitimate. Nor does the fact that Lewy was presented with an award by the Center for Eurasian Strategic Studies (ASAM), a Turkish think tank, prove that he is lying or is in the service of the Turkish government. Indeed, in many parts of his book, Lewy is highly critical of the quasi-official Turkish position which speaks of "so-called massacres".
Michael Gunter points out that Lewy's book has been praised by many reviewers, including the Ottoman military historian Edward J. Erickson in the International Journal of Middle East Studies and by the German scholar of comparative genocide, Eberhard Jäckel
, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
of March 23, 2006. Masaki Kakiszaki of the University of Utah assesses Lewy's work as follows in Critical Middle Eastern Studies:
Fatih Balci (University of Utah) and Arif Argul (Princeton University) praised Guenter Lewy's conclusions:
Canadian historian and journalist Gwynne Dyer
supported also Guenter Lewy's thesis, writing:
“What happened to the Armenians was dreadful, but as Lewy documents in his new book ‘The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide,’ which will most likely become the standard work on the subject, both premeditation and an intention to annihilate, two preconditions for genocide, were either absent or at least open to considerable dispute.”
On the other hand, the prominent genocide scholar Taner Akçam
published a lengthy review of Lewy's work, criticizing his methodology
and lack of familiarity with the workings of the Ottoman state. He also faulted him for basing his arguments on questionable premises and making select use of sources which conform to his own views and conclusions.
called Guenter Lewy
According to Lewy (referring to a previous version of this entry),
Lewy comments:
University of Massachusetts
This article relates to the statewide university system. For the flagship campus often referred to as "UMass", see University of Massachusetts Amherst...
. His works span several topics, but he is most often associated with his 1978 book on the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
, America in Vietnam
America in Vietnam
America in Vietnam is a book by Guenter Lewy about America's role in the Vietnam War. The book is highly influential, although it has remained controversial even decades after its publication...
, and several controversial works that deal with the applicability of the term genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
to various historical events.
In 1939, he immigrated to Palestine and then to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. He has been on the faculties of Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, Smith College
Smith College
Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters...
, and the University of Massachusetts
University of Massachusetts
This article relates to the statewide university system. For the flagship campus often referred to as "UMass", see University of Massachusetts Amherst...
. He currently lives in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
and is a frequent contributor to Commentary
Commentary (magazine)
Commentary is a monthly American magazine on politics, Judaism, social and cultural issues. It was founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945. By 1960 its editor was Norman Podhoretz, a liberal at the time who moved sharply to the right in the 1970s and 1980s becoming a strong voice for the...
.
Early life
Lewy was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), in 1923. At the age of nine he joined a German-Jewish scouts organization called Die Greifen (lit. "the griffinGriffin
The griffin, griffon, or gryphon is a legendary creature with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle...
s"), which he has suggested was important in shaping his desire for an academic career. Described by Lewy as a "quasi-Romantic" group, Die Greifen emphasized music, literature, and song, particularly Landsknecht
Landsknecht
Landsknechte were European, predominantly German mercenary pikemen and supporting foot soldiers from the late 15th to the late 16th century, and achieved the reputation for being the universal mercenary of Early modern Europe.-Etymology:The term is from German, Land "land, country" + Knecht...
lieder, encouraging the youths to avoid becoming "Spiessburger" ("philistines
Philistinism
Philistinism is a derogatory term used to a particular attitude or set of values perceived as despising or undervaluing art, beauty, spirituality, or intellectualism. A person with this attitude is referred to as a Philistine and may also be considered materialistic, favoring conventional social...
"). By 1938, as persecution of Jews in Germany increased, Lewy began to lobby his family to leave Germany behind. After Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht, also referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, and also Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht, and Novemberpogrome, was a pogrom or series of attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on 9–10 November 1938.Jewish homes were ransacked, as were shops, towns and...
, in November 1938, his family immigrated to Palestine
Palestine
Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....
.
Later in the war, when Lewy was of fighting age, he voluntarily took up arms against Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, serving in the Jewish Brigade
Jewish Brigade
The Jewish Infantry Brigade Group was a military formation of the British Army that served in Europe during the Second World War. The brigade was formed in late 1944, and its personnel fought the Germans in Italy...
.
The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany
First published in 1964, Lewy's The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany has proven both controversial and influential. Rolf HochhuthRolf Hochhuth
Rolf Hochhuth is a German author and playwright. He is best known for his 1963 drama The Deputy and remains a controversial figure for his plays and other public comments, such as his insinuation of Pope Pius XII's sympathies for Hitler's extermination of the Jews in the 1963 play The Deputy and...
's controversial play The Deputy
The Deputy
The Deputy, a Christian tragedy , also known as The Representative, is a controversial 1963 play by Rolf Hochhuth which indicts Pope Pius XII for his failure to take action or speak out against The Holocaust. It has been translated into more than twenty languages...
had appeared only a year earlier, indicting the Vatican for failing to act to save the Jews during the Holocaust; amidst the Vatican's outrage with the play, Lewy's text continued in the same vein:
One is inclined to conclude that the Pope and his advisers--influenced by the long tradition of moderate anti-Semitism so widely accepted in Vatican circles--did not view the plight of the Jews with a real sense of urgency and moral outrage. For this assertion no documentation is possible, but it is a conclusion difficult to avoid.
The text received much praise, including that of Alfred Grosser, who characterized the text as a "terribly precise volume" which demonstrated that "all the documents show the Catholic Church cooperating with the Nazi regime".
The Vatican opted to answer the critical allegations by releasing a series of documents
Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale
Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale , often abbreviated Actes or ADSS, is an eleven-volume collection of documents from the Vatican historical archives, related to the papacy of Pope Pius XII during World War II.The collection was compiled by four...
aiming to refute the growing perception of the Vatican having been conniving in the Holocaust. One Jesuit priest answering Lewy's text on behalf of the Vatican suggested that Lewy's conclusions were based "not on the record but on a subjective conviction... This ready acceptance of a Nazi-inspired wartime legend is a measure of Lewy's inability to plumb the motives of Pius XII... There is no proof, in this book or anywhere else, that Pius XII thought Nazism was a 'bulwark' in defense of Christianity."
In the context of other historical works examining the legacy of the Vatican in the era of the Holocaust, Lewy's work has been described as "exceedingly harsh" but also seminal and well-received.
America in Vietnam
Lewy had suggested that his America in VietnamAmerica in Vietnam
America in Vietnam is a book by Guenter Lewy about America's role in the Vietnam War. The book is highly influential, although it has remained controversial even decades after its publication...
, published in 1978, would "clear away the cobwebs of mythology that inhibit the correct understanding of what went on -- and what went wrong -- in Vietnam." The text, which argues against traditional or "orthodox" interpretations of the war as an unnecessary, unjust, and/or unwinnable war replete with disastrous mistakes and widespread American atrocities, has proven influential for many western scholars that share similar views of the conflict. It predated and influenced other reinterpretations including those of Norman Podhoretz
Norman Podhoretz
Norman B. Podhoretz is an American neoconservative pundit and writer for Commentary magazine.-Early life:The son of Julius and Helen Podhoretz, Jewish immigrants from the Central European region of Galicia, Podhoretz was born and raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn...
, Mark Moyar, and Michael Lind
Michael Lind
Michael Lind is an American writer. Currently Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., Editor of New American Contract and its blog Value Added, and a columnist for Salon magazine. Lind was a guest lecturer at Harvard Law School and...
. America in Vietnam thus attracted both criticism and support of Lewy for belonging to the "revisionist" school on Vietnam. Lewy argues,
It is the reasoned conclusion of this study... that the sense of guilt created by the Vietnam war in the minds of many Americans is not warranted and that the charges of officially, condoned illegal and grossly immoral conduct are without substance. Indeed, detailed examination of battlefield practices reveals that the loss civilian life in Vietnam was less great than in World War II and Korea and that concern with minimizing the ravages of the war was strong. To measure and compare the devastation and loss of human life caused by different war will be objectionable to those who repudiate all resort to military force as an instrument of foreign policy and may be construed as callousness. Yet as long as wars do take place at all it remains a moral duty to seek to reduce the agony caused by war, and the fulfillment of this obligation should not be disdained. I hope that this book may help demonstrate that moral convictions are not the exclusive possession of persons in conscience opposed to war, and that those who in certain circumstances accept the necessity and ethical justification of armed conflict also do care about human suffering.
Lewy criticizes what he terms the “war crime industry”, and what he perceives to be the double standards of the Western media, which, he alleged, neglected to report equally on the crimes of Vietnamese communists, giving the figure of 36,725 political assassinations perpetrated by the VC/NVA between 1957 and 1972. About the crimes committed by US soldiers, Guenter Lewy asserts that “between January 1965 and March 1973, 201 Army personnel in Vietnam were convicted by court-martial of serious offenses against Vietnamese. During the period of March 1965 to August 1971, 77 Marines were convicted of serious crimes against Vietnamese.”
In recalling the 1971 congressional testimony of some US veterans who were critical of the war, one of whom compared US action in Vietnam to genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
, Lewy suggests that some "witnesses sounded as if they had memorized North Vietnamese propaganda."
The book is broadly critical of domestic opponents of American participation in the Vietnam War. In using the phrases "peace activists" or "peace demonstrations", Lewy often puts quotation marks around the word "peace", implying alternative motivations for the activism. The author alleges a possible connection between cases of sabotage in the Navy and the anti-war movement:
Between 1965 and 1970, the Navy experienced a growing number of cases of sabotage and arson on its ships, but no evidence could be found that antiwar activists had directly participated in a sabotage attempt on a Navy vessel. Cases of fraggingFrag (military)In the U.S. military, fragging refers to the act of attacking a superior officer in one's chain of command with the intent to kill that officer. The term originated during the Vietnam War and was most commonly used to mean the assassination of an unpopular officer of one's own fighting unit...
and avoidance of combat may well have been instigated at times by antiwar militants, though no hard evidence of organized subversion was ever discovered.
The text was praised by Vietnam veteran and current US Senator Jim Webb
Jim Webb
James Henry "Jim" Webb, Jr. is the senior United States Senator from Virginia. He is also an author and a former Secretary of the Navy. He is a member of the Democratic Party....
, Andrew J. Pierre of Foreign Affairs
Foreign Affairs
Foreign Affairs is an American magazine and website on international relations and U.S. foreign policy published since 1922 by the Council on Foreign Relations six times annually...
, and by several newspapers, including The Economist, which described it as "in many way the best history of the war yet to appear". Critics included historians of the "orthodox" school as well as polemical critics such as linguist and famous Vietnam War opponent Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
. Chomsky, after being singled out for criticism by Lewy in the book, wrote that "every state has its Guenter Lewys". According to Chomsky, Lewy's "concept of the writing of moral-historical tracts... is misrepresentation of documents, uncritical regurgitation of government claims, and dismissal of annoying facts that contradict them, and [his] concept of morality is such as to legitimate virtually any atrocity against civilians once the state has issued its commands."
Winter Soldier Investigation
America in Vietnam, which appeared seven years after the Winter Soldier InvestigationWinter Soldier Investigation
The "Winter Soldier Investigation" was a media event sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War from January 31, 1971 – February 2, 1971. It was intended to publicize war crimes and atrocities by the United States Armed Forces and their allies in the Vietnam War...
, became controversial in the context of the 2004 US Presidential Election. Presidential hopeful John Kerry
John Kerry
John Forbes Kerry is the senior United States Senator from Massachusetts, the 10th most senior U.S. Senator and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party in the 2004 presidential election, but lost to former President George W...
had been involved with the Winter Soldier Investigation; in the context of the campaign, Lewy's suggestion that the Winter Soldier Investigation was dishonest and politically motivated was frequently cited to impugn John Kerry's reputation.
Vietnam Veterans Against the War
Vietnam Veterans Against the War
Vietnam Veterans Against the War is a tax-exempt non-profit organization and corporation, originally created to oppose the Vietnam War. VVAW describes itself as a national veterans' organization that campaigns for peace, justice, and the rights of all United States military veterans...
, the group of which Kerry had been a part, alleged that American war policy and conduct in Vietnam was resulting in warcrimes being committed. Lewy suggests that the group used "fake witnesses" in the Winter Soldier hearing in Detroit, and that its allegations were formally investigated:
The results of the investigation, carried out by the Naval Investigative Service, are interesting and revealing. Many of the veterans, though assured that they would not be questioned about the atrocities they might have committed personally, refused to be interviewed. One of the active members of the VVAW told investigators that the leadership had directed the entire membership not to cooperate with military authorities. A black marine who agreed to be interviewed was unable to provide details of the outrages he had described at the hearing, but he called the Vietnam war "one huge atrocity" and "a racist plot." He admitted that the question of atrocities had not occurred to him while he was in Vietnam, and that he had been assisted in the preparation of his testimony by a member of the Nation of IslamNation of IslamThe Nation of Islam is a mainly African-American new religious movement founded in Detroit, Michigan by Wallace D. Fard Muhammad in July 1930 to improve the spiritual, mental, social, and economic condition of African-Americans in the United States of America. The movement teaches black pride and...
. But the most damaging finding consisted of the sworn statements of several veterans, corroborated by witnesses, that they had in fact not attended the hearing in Detroit. One of them had never been to Detroit in all his life. He did not know, he stated, who might have used his name.
Government officials today have no record of any such Naval Investigative Service report, although they suggest that it could have been lost or destroyed. Lewy later said that he could not recall if he had actually seen the alleged report or simply been told of its contents. "I don't think Lewy is interested in presenting any of [the Winter Soldier testimony] as truthful," University of Richmond history professor Ernest Bolt told the Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...
. "He has an angle on the war as a whole." Bolt said it is impossible to tell whether Lewy fairly characterized the naval investigative report because no other historian had seen it.
The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies
Lewy argues in The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies that the Gypsies' overall plight does "not constitute genocide within the meaning of the genocide convention." Lewy concludes that in the case of the Nazi persecution of the Gypsies the "use of the term 'genocide' would seem to involve a dilution of the concept.", but that the question is not to know if the Holocaust is worst crime of Nazis; refuse the "genocide" label is not, Lewy argues, a way to minimize the sufferings of Gypsies, Poles, Russians, and other non-Jewish victims of Nazism. The Introduction is devoted to the long story of violence against Gypsies before than the Nazis take power, with a special focus on the laws adopted in Bavaria and some other German Länder in the end of XIXth century and in the beginning of XXth century, showing the continuity between the last year of Weimar Republic and the first years of Nazi regime. In a section entitled "Roots of Hostility", Guenter Lewy argues that prejudice is the main reason of the persecution against Gypsies before 1933 is prejudice, and that the Gypsies are not a violent people, but adds that prejudice is not always the single reason; the misbehavior of a minority among nomadic Gypsies contributed also to hostility and prejudices.The book was praised by Saul Friedlander
Saul Friedländer
Saul Friedländer is an award-winning Israeli historian and currently a professor of history at UCLA.-Biography:...
, who called it "a work of great compassion and exemplary scholarship." According to Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as a seminal study of the Nazi Final...
, "Lewy's account of Nazi measures against the powerless Gypsies is unsurpassed in the English language." Henriette Asséo, lecturer at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
The École des hautes études en sciences sociales is a leading French institution for research and higher education, a Grand Établissement. Its mission is research and research training in the social sciences, including the relationship these latter maintain with the natural and life sciences...
(School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, Paris), specialist of Gypsy history, wrote that Guenter Lewy's book "requires humility, giving a new, considerable documentation", adding, however, that the rejection of "genocide" label can be "discussed" Hans Mommsen agreed totally with Guenter Lewy, including with the rejection of "genocide" qualification.
The book has also been singled out for criticism, particularly by Romani scholars, who believe that it blames the Roma people for their own massacre. Lewy's work has been criticized as a text which "overstates" the differences of the persecution of Jews and the persecution of Roma in the Nazi era, in a manner indicative of "the priorities of latter-day scholarship, about the way that the murder of the Jews has been promoted to obscure so much of the rest of the Nazi record of atrocity".
Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?
In September 2004, Lewy published an essay entitled Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?:[E]ven if some episodes can be considered genocidal—that is, tending toward genocide—they certainly do not justify condemning an entire society. Guilt is personal, and for good reason the Genocide Convention provides that only "persons" can be charged with the crime, probably even ruling out legal proceedings against governments.
As to whether the American Indian experience resembles the fate of the Jews under the Nazi regime:
No matter how difficult the conditions under which the Indians labored—obligatory work, often inadequate food and medical care, corporal punishment—their experience bore no comparison with the fate of the Jews in the ghettos.
The paper is highly critical of Ward Churchill
Ward Churchill
Ward LeRoy Churchill is an author and political activist. He was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1990 to 2007. The primary focus of his work is on the historical treatment of political dissenters and Native Americans by the United States government...
, particularly in regards to his attributing the word "genocide" to the destruction of American Indian civilization. Lewy dismissed Churchill's assertion that the U.S. Army intentionally spread smallpox among American Indian
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
s by distributing infected blankets in 1837 as bogus.
The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey
In The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide, Lewy argues that there is insufficient evidence of the Young TurkYoung Turks
The Young Turks , from French: Les Jeunes Turcs) were a coalition of various groups favouring reformation of the administration of the Ottoman Empire. The movement was against the absolute monarchy of the Ottoman Sultan and favoured a re-installation of the short-lived Kanûn-ı Esâsî constitution...
regime organizing the massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. According to Professor Tessa Hoffmann of Berlin's Free University
Free University
Free University may refer to any of the following universities:* Université Libre de Bruxelles, located in Brussels, Belgium* Vrije Universiteit Brussel, located in Brussels, Belgium* Free University of Berlin, located in Berlin, Germany...
, Lewy had conceived of the idea of writing on the Armenian Genocide as early as 2000:
In his book he states that the killings were not genocide, because they have not been proven to have been governmentally organized, and also because “the argument that the deportations in reality constituted a premeditated program of extermination of the Armenians of Turkey is difficult to square with many aspects and characteristics of the relocations”, including the non deportation of Armenian communities of cities like Istanbul, Smyrna (Izmir) and Aleppo; the fact that “the trek on foot that took so many lives was imposed only on the Armenian in eastern and central Anatolia, a part of the country that had no railroad. Although the one-spur Baghdad railway was overburdened with the transport of troops and supplies, the deportees from the western provinces and Cilicia who had the money were allowed to purchase ticket by rail and were spared at least some of the tribulations of the deportation process”; the “great deal of variation of variation” exhibitted by the resettlement process, “that depended on factors such as geography and the attitude of local officials”. According to Guenter Lewy, “the Ottoman government wanted to arrange an orderly process, but did not have the means to do so.”
About the number of Armenian victims, Guenter Lewy argues that it “can only be estimated, because no death statistics for this period exist”; calculating the total losses of Ottoman Armenians between 1914 and 1919, Guenter Lewy uses the figure of 1,750,000 individuals for the pre-war population in the whole Ottoman Empire, figure used by historians like Charles Dowsett
Charles dowsett
Charles James Frank Dowsett was the first Calouste Gulbenkian Professor of Armenian at the University of Oxford from 1965 to 1991...
and Malcolm E. Yapp, then estimate the number of survivors in 1919 to around 1,108,000, making an average of several estimations, including the tabulation of George Montgomery (American official in the Paris peace conference in charge of Near East) and the figure of the Armenian National Council of Constantinople; so, Guenter Lewy estimates the total losses for World War I to around 642,000.
Lewy's research on this and related topics has been criticized by University of California, Davis
University of California, Davis
The University of California, Davis is a public teaching and research university established in 1905 and located in Davis, California, USA. Spanning over , the campus is the largest within the University of California system and third largest by enrollment...
professor Keith David Watenpaugh
Keith David Watenpaugh
Keith David Watenpaugh is an Associate Professor ofModern Islam, Human Rights and Peace at the University of California, Davis...
:
- [Lewy's] recent writings on mass violence including those on Native AmericansIndigenous peoples of the AmericasThe indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
, the Roma, and now the ArmeniansArmeniansArmenian people or Armenians are a nation and ethnic group native to the Armenian Highland.The largest concentration is in Armenia having a nearly-homogeneous population with 97.9% or 3,145,354 being ethnic Armenian....
indicate a belief that the ShoahShoahShoah may refer to:*The Holocaust*Shoah , documentary directed by Claude Lanzmann * A Shoah Foundation...
was the unique genocide of the 20th century, a position generally rejected by scholars of the Holocaust... the larger purpose of Lewy's intellectual output ...[is] to construct a conceptual lattice for Holocaust exceptionalism and defend political claims that might be derived thereby.
According to David B. MacDonald
David B. MacDonald
David Bruce MacDonald has an international reputation in the academic fields of Comparative Indigenous Politics, US politics, International Relations, nationalism studies, genocide and human rights. Born in Leeds, UK in 1973, he was raised in Canada, and is currently Associate Professor in...
, Lewy "actually denies the Armenian genocide in a manner similar to his denial of the American Indian and Roma genocides", and "while the sources he uses are either Turkish or pro-Turkish, Lewy insists that 'debate' is ongoing and there has been no resolution". MacDonald points out that sources like Kamuran Gurun and Bernard Lewis
Bernard Lewis
Bernard Lewis, FBA is a British-American historian, scholar in Oriental studies, and political commentator. He is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University...
"hardly demonstrate the existence of a genuine academic dispute".
According to the Intelligence Report journal of Southern Poverty Law Center
Southern Poverty Law Center
The Southern Poverty Law Center is an American nonprofit civil rights organization noted for its legal victories against white supremacist groups; legal representation for victims of hate groups; monitoring of alleged hate groups, militias and extremist organizations; and educational programs that...
,
"Lewy is one of the most active members of a network of American scholars, influence peddlers and website operators, financed by hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from the government of Turkey, who promote the denial of the Armenian genocide — a network so influential that it was able last fall to defy both historical truth and enormous political pressure to convince America's lawmakers and even its president to reverse long-held policy positions.
But it's not only Armenians calling the slaughter a genocide, and there is no real debate about its essential details, according to the vast majority of credible historians. Although Lewy's brand of genocide denial is subtler than that of Holocaust deniers who declare there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, it's no less an attempt to rewrite history."
Mark Potok
Mark Potok
Mark Potok is a spokesman and director of publications and information for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, a nonprofit organization that arose from the anti-segregation movement to counter extremism and hate crimes....
, the editor of Intelligence Report, wrote that "Despite the efforts of people like Lewy—many of them funded by the Turkish government—the facts of the Armenian genocide are quite well known. The ruling party of the day massacred intellectuals, forced hundreds of thousands of Armenians into what amounted to death marches, and systematically despoiled the victims of their property. Professor Raphael Lemkin coined the word "genocide" in 1943 with the Armenian slaughter in mind. In 2005, the International Association of Genocide Scholars wrote the Turkish foreign minister to remind him that the massacre of Christian Armenians was indeed 'a systematic genocide'."
On November 17, 2008, Guenter Lewy filed a defamation suit against the Southern Poverty Law Center, Inc., and writer-editor David Holthouse in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
On September 28, 2010, the case was settled when the SPLC agreed to publish a retraction and apologize to Lewy, for suggesting that he was "a Turkish agent". In its statement, the SPLC stated that it had erred in assuming that "any scholar who challenges the Armenian genocide narrative necessarily has been financially compromised by the government of Turkey." The settlement with Lewy included an undisclosed monetary payment. Lewy's council in the case, David Salzman and Bruce Fein
Bruce Fein
Bruce Fein is a lawyer in the United States who specializes in constitutional and international law. Fein has written numerous articles on constitutional issues for The Washington Times, Slate.com, The New York Times, Legal Times, and is active on the issues of civil liberties...
, lead the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund.
About the vote of IAGS, Guenter Lewy wrote:
- I am less than impressed by the unanimous vote of the International Association of Genocide Scholars that the Armenian case “was one of the major genocides of the modern era.” The great majority of these self-proclaimed experts on Ottoman history have never set foot in an archive or done any other original research on the subject in question.
According to Joseph Albert Kechichian
Joseph Albert Kechichian
Joseph A. Kéchichian is an American scholar of Armenian descent, a renowned historian and political scientist specializing on the Persian Gulf region, focusing in the domestic and regional concerns of Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen...
, writing in the International Journal of Middle East Studies
International Journal of Middle East Studies
The International Journal of Middle East Studies is a scholarly journal published by the Middle East Studies Association of North America , a learned society.-See also:* Edinburgh Middle East Report* Middle East Research and Information Project...
,:
- ... Lewy has been amply rewarded by Turkish authorities in Ankara and abroad through the launching of a massive campaign to distribute his book free of charge to libraries and to select groups of diplomats. Equally noteworthy, Lewy has been decorated at a special ceremony in Ankara with, ironically, the İnsanlığa Karşı İşlenen Suçlar Yüksek Ödülü (High Award for Fighting in Opposition to Crimes Against Humanity)... [by] a well-known organization whose mission includes the systematic denial of the Armenian genocide through propagandistic and partisan research and publications; the organization is sponsored and underwritten by the Turkish government.
Writing in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Professor of Political Science Michael Gunter has argued that the fact that Lewy's book was distributed free to libraries does not demonstrate that the argument of the book is somehow illegitimate. Nor does the fact that Lewy was presented with an award by the Center for Eurasian Strategic Studies (ASAM), a Turkish think tank, prove that he is lying or is in the service of the Turkish government. Indeed, in many parts of his book, Lewy is highly critical of the quasi-official Turkish position which speaks of "so-called massacres".
Michael Gunter points out that Lewy's book has been praised by many reviewers, including the Ottoman military historian Edward J. Erickson in the International Journal of Middle East Studies and by the German scholar of comparative genocide, Eberhard Jäckel
Eberhard Jäckel
Eberhard Jäckel is a Social Democratic German historian, noted for his studies of Adolf Hitler's role in German history. Jäckel sees Hitler as being the historical equivalent to the Chernobyl disaster.-Career:...
, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , short F.A.Z., also known as the FAZ, is a national German newspaper, founded in 1949. It is published daily in Frankfurt am Main. The Sunday edition is the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung .F.A.Z...
of March 23, 2006. Masaki Kakiszaki of the University of Utah assesses Lewy's work as follows in Critical Middle Eastern Studies:
- The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey is an important accomplishment by a political scientist who has worked on comparative studies of genocidal issues. He not only spells out many inconsistencies, illogical reasoning, and presentation of unauthentic historical documents appearing in the Armenian and Turkish accounts but also identifies where researchers need to go for further enquiry. The attack against Lewy's book and the controversy created by Peter Balakian and others who share his views indicate the problem of academic freedom of speech with respect to events associated with the Turkish-Armenian conflicts. There are coordinated efforts by Armenian NGOs and scholars to silence and suppress different interpretations about the events of 1915.
Fatih Balci (University of Utah) and Arif Argul (Princeton University) praised Guenter Lewy's conclusions:
- There could be some mistakes in the history, but it should be more objective to enlighten those mistaken events with the helping of the historians. Guenter Lewy’s book, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey, A Disputed Genocide, mainly focuses on the massacres in Ottoman Turkey, and he strongly stands on the way of the truths which he finds from the historical documents. After all, he mentions that trustfully the deaths of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey can not be called “genocide”. There were some deaths but they can not be called as genocide. For calling genocide, it is needed to have a look at the definition of genocide which is mostly accepted to intention to annihilation of one group. To use or say genocide for an event it has to involve an intention of annihilation. In the Armenian case the main aim was not based on the intention of Armenian annihilation. The only thing was deporting· the Armenians from some places only for security purposes, because the Armenians became a big problem for the Turks during World War I with the rebellions and armed guerillas inside the country.
Canadian historian and journalist Gwynne Dyer
Gwynne Dyer
Gwynne Dyer, OC is a London-based independent Canadian journalist, syndicated columnist and military historian.Dyer was born in St. John's, Newfoundland and joined the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve at the age of sixteen...
supported also Guenter Lewy's thesis, writing:
“What happened to the Armenians was dreadful, but as Lewy documents in his new book ‘The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide,’ which will most likely become the standard work on the subject, both premeditation and an intention to annihilate, two preconditions for genocide, were either absent or at least open to considerable dispute.”
On the other hand, the prominent genocide scholar Taner Akçam
Taner Akçam
Altuğ Taner Akçam is a Turkish historian and sociologist. He is one of the first Turkish academics to acknowledge and openly discuss the Armenian Genocide, and is recognized as a "leading international authority" on the subject....
published a lengthy review of Lewy's work, criticizing his methodology
Methodology
Methodology is generally a guideline for solving a problem, with specificcomponents such as phases, tasks, methods, techniques and tools . It can be defined also as follows:...
and lack of familiarity with the workings of the Ottoman state. He also faulted him for basing his arguments on questionable premises and making select use of sources which conform to his own views and conclusions.
Uniqueness of the Holocaust
In the Journal of Genocide Research, David StannardDavid Stannard
David Edward Stannard is an American historian and Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii. He is particularly known for his book American Holocaust , on the genocide of the native American population.-Early life:He was born to Florence E. Harwood Stannard and David L. Stannard,...
called Guenter Lewy
- one of the last of a disappearing breed: the extreme "uniqueness" advocate determined to assert—in the face of contrary and increasingly overwhelming fact and logic—that, of all the mass killings that have ever occurred in the history of the world, only the Holocaust, or more precisely the Shoah, rose to the level of true "genocide."
According to Lewy (referring to a previous version of this entry),
- The same canard appears in the Wikipedia article about me which states that my various publications "promote the singularity of the genocide of Jews in the Holocaust" and in other reviews of my work.
Lewy comments:
- Let me try to set the record straight: In none of my writings have I ever asserted the uniqueness or singularity of the Holocaust, and indeed I do not believe that the Holocaust is the only instance of mass killing that deserves to be classified as an act of genocide. With Yehuda BauerYehuda BauerYehuda Bauer is a historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.-Biography:...
I would call the Holocaust unprecedented but not unique, because the term unique suggests that something like the Holocaust can never happen again. In point of fact, later in the twentieth century we witnessed the terrible genocides of Cambodia and Rwanda. I would welcome it if critics of my work would limit themselves to dealing with the substance of my positions rather than falsely impute to me ulterior motives.