No person of Turkish heritage would accept what the Turkish Government has to say about this issue, as the final word. Just like no person of Armenian heritage should care about what the Armenian side has to say. What every person needs to do is look at the facts. If there were REAL proof of government-sponsored evil planned against the Armenians, a people who peacefully lived with and prospered beside the Turks for over five centuries, it would be Turks crying out against such horrors before most everyone else... one's humanity and integrity should ideally supersede loyalty to one's ethnic tribe.
It turns out that the Russians trained Armenians to fight for national identity in Anatolia (Turkey).
Much of what is Armenian Genocide happened to the Armenians who were guerrillas terrorizing the Turks.
And the Turks had to kick out the Armenians out of Turkey to prevent a civil war.
Certainly, Armenians got killed as a result of massacres... often by their Muslim neighbors, in reprisal for the murderous acts committed by the Armenians (when they sided with the Russian enemy in hopes of carving out their own independence); but anybody who calls acts of massacres a "genocide" doesn't know the meaning of the word. (At least the way most of us perceive the meaning, as with what Hitler did to the Jews; the legal definition of genocide is essentially meaningless, and can be applied to almost any conflict.) If a genocide is how you like to describe what happened to the Armenians, then you need to refer to what American soldiers committed in My Lai as a "genocide."
Ironically, if anyone acted genocidally, with the intention of systematically wiping out people because of their ethnic or religious identity, it was the people who are traditionally accepted as the victims of this conflict. Another irony is that while Armenians have been doing their utmost to portray Turks as Nazis (in an effort to equate themselves with Holocaust victims, the one group best known to have fallen prey to genocide), Turks did their best to save Jews during World War II... while Armenians actively supported the Nazi cause.
For prior to the "Genocides" of 1914-1915, many Armenians were well established in the Ottoman Empire.
The only reason for this "genocide" was to prevent Turkish people from being slaughtered by Armenian militants in their villages.
It appears obvious that the Turkish authorities, anxious for the safety of their lines of communication, had no other alternative than to order the removal of their rebellious subjects to some place distant from the seat of hostilities, and their internment there.
The enforcement of this absolutely necessary precaution led to further risings on the part of the Armenians. The remaining Muslims were almost defenceless, because the regular garrisons were at the front as well as the greater part of the police and able-bodied men. Already infuriated at the reports of the atrocities committed at Van by the insurgents, in fear for their lives and those of their relatives, they were at last driven by the cumulative effect of these events into panic and retaliation and, as invariably happens in such cases, the innocent suffered with the guilty.
C.F. Dixon-Johnson, British author of the 1916 book, "The Armenians."
1 comment:
Armenian nationalism & Ottoman cruelty both led to the Armenian Genocide.
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