its the 100 year anniversary of 1.5 million people dying. thats like all of oklahoma city gone...very scary but this guy texas yank knows whats up. if they deny it all this time no announcement by america is gonna change their minds or prevent future killings.
Every Turkish leader has acted like it didn't happen. My own opinion is that this should be recognized by history for what it is. I agree holding the current Turkish government responsible isn't really going to do anything but whitewashing history just guarantees that this issue festers.
I just want to be clear that I'm not defending Turkey's denials, I just think the notion that it will somehow prevent future genocide if they finally admit it is just pie in the sky idealism. "The powerful [will] always prey on the powerless, that's how they became powerful in the first place." -Tyrion Lannister
He's certainly denying it but it really doesn't have to do with being an "islamist." Turkey's secular governments always had the same attitude towards the Armenians.
Not in that fashion. Erdogan doesn't shy away from attacking the Pope and threatening governments of other countries not to call the genocide a genocide. There is a difference between not admitting something and aggressively threatening sovereign governments for telling the truth. And it has everything to do with being Islamist - a big reason the Armenians were murdered was that they weren't Muslims. And that's partly why Erdogan, in addition to being nationalist, is so aggressive about the issue. He will never accept that Muslims are at fault. If you want to educate yourself about the issue: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/w...ury-of-denial-about-an-armenian-genocide.html A Century After Armenian Genocide, Turkey’s Denial Only Deepens Nearly 1.5 million Armenians died at the hands of the Ottoman Empire in 1915, during World War I. Turks by and large do not believe mass killings were planned. CUNGUS, Turkey — The crumbling stone monastery, built into the hillside, stands as a forlorn monument to an awful past. So, too, does the decaying church on the other side of this mountain village. Farther out, a crevice is sliced into the earth, so deep that peering into it, one sees only blackness. Haunting for its history, it was there that a century ago, an untold number of Armenians were tossed to their deaths. “They threw them in that hole, all the men,” said Vahit Sahin, 78, sitting at a cafe in the center of the village, reciting the stories that have passed through generations. Mr. Sahin turned in his chair and pointed toward the monastery. “That side was Armenian.” He turned back. “This side was Muslim. At first, they were really friendly with each other.” A hundred years ago, amid the upheaval of World War I, this village and countless others across eastern Anatolia became killing fields as the desperate leadership of the Ottoman Empire, having lost the Balkans and facing the prospect of losing its Arab territories as well, saw a threat closer to home. Worried that the Christian Armenian population was planning to align with Russia, a primary enemy of the Ottoman Turks, officials embarked on what historians have called the first genocide of the 20th century: Nearly 1.5 million Armenians were killed, some in massacres like the one here, others in forced marches to the Syrian desert that left them starved to death. The genocide was the greatest atrocity of the Great War. It also remains that conflict’s most bitterly contested legacy, having been met by the Turkish authorities with 100 years of silence and denial. For surviving Armenians and their descendants, the genocide became a central marker of their identity, the psychic wounds passed through generations. “Armenians have passed one whole century, screaming to the world that this happened,” said Gaffur Turkay, whose grandfather, as a young boy, survived the genocide and was taken in by a Muslim family. Mr. Turkay, in recent years, after discovering his heritage, began identifying as an Armenian and converted to Christianity. “We want to be part of this country with our original identities, just as we were a century ago,” he said. Memorials Worldwide The 100th anniversary will be commemorated on April 24, the date the Ottomans rounded up a group of Armenian notables in Istanbul in 1915 as the first step in what historians now agree was a wider plan of annihilation. Armenians from Turkey and the diaspora are preparing to gather in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square to honor the dead. They will also hold a concert featuring Armenian and Turkish musicians. Similar ceremonies will be held in capitals around the world, including in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, where Kim Kardashian, who is of Armenian descent, recently visited with her husband, the rapper Kanye West, to highlight the genocide. That the European Parliament and Pope Francis recently described the massacres as a genocide adds to the pressure on Ankara. The Turkish government acknowledges that atrocities were committed, but says they happened in wartime, when plenty of other people were dying. Officials stoutly deny there was ever any plan to systematically wipe out the Armenian population — the commonly accepted definition of genocide. Ankara is not participating in any of the memorials, nor does it appear ready to meet Armenian demands for an apology. Instead, on the same day of the genocide anniversary, the Turkish authorities scheduled a centennial commemoration of the Battle of Gallipoli, an event that helped lay the foundation of modern Turkish identity. The anniversary comes after several years in which the Turkish government seemed to be softening its position. With the flourishing of new civic society organizations, the government became more tolerant of views of history that differed from the official one. Last year, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in offering condolences to the Armenians, went further than any Turkish leader ever had in acknowledging the painful history. Yet as the anniversary has drawn near, the situation has fallen back into well-established patterns: Turkish denial, Armenian anger and little sign of reconciliation. Mr. Erdogan has turned combative, embracing the traditional narrative. “The Armenian diaspora is trying to instill hatred against Turkey through a worldwide campaign on genocide claims ahead of the centennial anniversary of 1915,” Mr. Erdogan said recently. “If we examine what our nation had to go through over the past 100 to 150 years, we would find far more suffering than what the Armenians went through.” In a country defined by its divisions, between the secular and the religious, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, the legacy of the Armenian genocide is a unifying issue for Turks. A recent poll conducted by the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies, an Istanbul research organization, found that only 9 percent of Turks thought the government should label the atrocities a genocide and apologize for them. Turkey’s ossified position, so at odds with the historical scholarship, is a legacy of how the Turkish republic was established after World War I. Under its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, society here underwent a process of Turkification: a feat of social engineering based on an erasure of the past and the denial of a multiethnic history. The Armenian massacres were wiped from the country’s history, only to emerge for ordinary Turks in the 1970s after an Armenian terrorist campaign against Turkish diplomats. Even now, Turkish textbooks describe the Armenians as traitors, call the Armenian genocide a lie and say that the Ottoman Turks took “necessary measures” to counter Armenian separatism. A room at the Istanbul Military Museum is devoted to the suffering of Muslims at the hands of Armenian militants. “There clearly were Armenian revolutionaries and rebels who were intending to side with Russia,” said Thomas de Waal, a historian with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who recently wrote a book on the genocide titled “The Great Catastrophe.” “This is a case of punishing the whole for the perceived disloyalty of a few.” ------------ Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide The original caption of photograph reads: "The Above Photograph Shows Eight Armenian Professors Massacred by the Turks" If you think that ISIS invented beheadings on behalf of Muslims. No, Mohammed did and it kept happening throughout history.
It's always funny to read one's own opinions 5 years later. Moreso than before, I feel like we should acknowledge it. It's a little embarrassing that the US has this international distinction of not recognizing it. And if they are our friends, we shouldn't be afraid to call them out for being wrong. If they like, they can condemn our genocide of Native Americans and enslavement of blacks. We can take it. I also think the Turkish position has slightly more merit than people give it credit for. I think they're hiding national sins behind historical complexity (like some in the South do about the motivations for Texas Independence or the Civil War), but I do recognize that it was a very chaotic time in their history and many peoples did suffer. I'd give that context a nod while calling the genocide a genocide. That might make it go down easier even if it's no excuse.
Turkey won't recognize it for another few decades. You guys won't recognize it until they do, as long as that NATO base is helping you steal people's sovereignty in the region. It's all a game of course, we're preeeeeeeeeeetty much at the point now where recognizing it won't cause any problems for Turkey. If we were having this conversation a long time ago, there are reparations and prisoners and such to resolve. Just like Jewish terrorists (now known as the IDF) and mass import of Europeans into the British Mandate Palestine (now known as most Israelis), if a crime is far enough in history you never have to pay for it, no matter how big and you can market the events differently later on. The somewhat good news though is the huge majority of young Turkish people know that it was a genocide and that's really where the lessons need to be learned most rather than two politicians who both know it was a genocide - and they know we know they know - playing childish games.
You can see in his next post, it's really all about 100% american interests even if it means suspending justice for millions of Armenians. The holocaust is also a real genocide but the difference is that recognizing it IS in the best interests of the US so that was done fairly quickly in comparison.
Well here's an interesting article about various "genocides". A pretty good list but the several million excess deaths in Vietnam as we fought to prevent Ho Chi Minh from winning and the million excess deaths in Iraq the United States caused unnecessarily should certainly be considered essentially similar magnitude crimes. ************ http://www.unz.com/emargolis/no-people-have-an-exclusive-on-suffering/ Many nations now call the slaughter of 1915-1916 as “genocide.” This week the 100 th anniversary of the notorious event was observed. Pope Francis and the European parliament called on Turkey to recognize the killings as genocide. Turkey, successor to the Ottoman Empire, admits many Armenians were killed in WWI, but rejects the label of “genocide,” saying their deaths occurred in the confusion of war, not by design. The United States, a very close ally of Turkey, avoids the “g” word. Interestingly, Israel does too, perhaps not wanting to detract from the genocide Jews suffered in WWII Modern Turkey is determined to avoid being branded with the shame of genocide because it tends to demote the bearer to a second-rate nation forever begging forgiveness, like eternally cringing Germany. But what really galls the Turks is being singled out as genocidal mass killers when so many other similar perpetrators are ignored. Begin with Spain, which wiped out its Muslim population then inflicted mass murder on West Indian native islanders, then in its Latin American colonies. No one even remembers the Arawak Indians, for example, wiped out by the Spaniards, British, and French. In the United States, the mass killing and ethnic cleansing of its native people is a horrific crime rarely talked about today. Here, the historic record is loud and clear, unlike that of the chaotic Ottoman Empire. White-men’s diseases finished off what bullets and starvation failed to accomplish. Why don’t we commemorate Stalin’s ghastly solution to independent-minded Ukrainians? During 1932-33, the Soviet secret police murdered by bullets and famine six million or more Ukrainians – the Holdomor. Not long after, Roosevelt and Churchill allied themselves to the author of this historic crime, Stalin, who killed four times more people than Adolf Hitler. His crimes against Jews and other peoples are widely recognized and commemorated. No one today in the West commemorates Stalin’s murder of many millions of Soviet citizens. Nor is the plight of East Europe’s ethnic Germans recalled. Between 1945-1948, 12 million were expelled at gunpoint from their ancestral homes, 500,000-600,000 being killed in the process. The majority came from former German territory annexed by Poland, the USSR, and Czechoslovakia. Largely unknown was the genocide of the Soviet Union’s Muslims. Some four millions were murdered or starved to death under Stalin’s orders. Stalin, a Georgian or Ossetian, hated Muslims with the same ferocity that Hitler hated Jews – but he was a US-British ally. Next, the “Mfakane.” During the 1820’s, the Zulu moved south into what is today South Africa, slaughtering 1-2 million local tribesmen. It’s worth noting that the Dutch-Flemish Boer inhabitants of the Cape were there long before the Zulu, who dominated today’s South Africa. Belgium’s mass murders in its Congo colony are branded genocide by some historians. A million or more Cambodians were slaughtered by the demented, Maoist Khmer Rouge. The details of the murder of up to one million communists in Indonesia during a 1965-1966 US-backed coup remain obscure. History is filled with forgotten genocides – all part of our inhumane tribal culture. So blame the Turks, but don’t forget all the other mass killers.
I'd say the article is problematic. For one, they describe Germany as 'cringing' which is not how I'd characterize that country today. But, also all these atrocities that they say aren't recognized or talked about in the West today are indeed recognized and talked about. I don't think anyone is deluding themselves here about the genocide of the Native American. The crimes of Stalin haven't exactly been swept under the rug.
Maybe I'm just too down on international definitions of crimes, but as far as I can tell, genocide is just the label that we put on systematic murder of a specific ethnic group, religious group or nationality when it is done by our enemies or past enemies. I don't think there is a satisfying distinction as to why genocide should not encompass people exterminated for political reasons in addition to the commonly accepted reasons. If a country wants to recognize what they have done as genocide, then let them. If they don't, then let them make that mistake. We continue to make the mistake of not recognizing or properly atoning for our past genocides and we are more or less moving forward, however imperfectly.
i learned a little more about this. ive changed my position from turkey needs to say it to turkey should say it, but so should other countries like japan for nanjing massacre. the problem is the word genocide didn't exist back then and there was no specific intent to wipe out the armenians and the current nation of turkey didn't exist during the ottoman empire. this is basically a matter of law and technicalities. idk if saying genoicde officially means you gotta talk about repaying ppl, giving back their land etc. if they refuse to officially label it that way, at least they should teach about what really happened in schools kinda like we do here with the indians. i don't think obama has officially said the crying trail of cherokees was a genocide, but at least we all know about it.
Clueless as usual Have you heard of Belgium genocide in Congo, or Italian genocide in Ethiopia or Frensh génocide et assassinat in Northern Africa? [youtube]Hn3t5TqegHs[/youtube] As what glynch 'v said ,you can't single out just one nation for a crime shared by multiple nations
