October 17, 2007

THE BEAUTY OF IT IS...:

Armenian story has another side (Norman Stone, October 16, 2007, Chicago Tribune)

In 1914, when World War I began in earnest, Armenians living in what is now Turkey attempted to set up a national state. Armenians revolted against the Ottoman government, began what we would now call "ethnic cleansing" of the local Turks. Their effort failed and caused the government to deport most Armenians from the area of the revolt for security reasons. Their sufferings en route are well-known. [...]

There are many other arguments against a supposed genocide of the Armenians. Their leader was offered a post in the Turkish Cabinet in 1914, and turned it down. When the deportations were under way, the populations of the big cities were exempted -- Istanbul, Izmir, Aleppo, where there were huge concentrations of Armenians. There were indeed well-documented and horrible massacres of the deportee columns, and the Turks themselves tried more than 1,300 men for these crimes in 1916, convicted many and executed several. None of this squares with genocide, as we classically understand it. Finally, it is just not true that historians as a whole support the genocide thesis. The people who know the background and the language (Ottoman Turkish is terribly difficult) are divided, and those who do not accept the genocide thesis are weightier. The Armenian lobby contends that these independent and highly esteemed historians are simply "Ottomanists" -- a ridiculously arrogant dismissal.


...once you stake out victim status, few will question your arrogance.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 17, 2007 4:30 PM
Comments

Hmmm. So Serdar Argic was correct after all. He used to turn up on Usenet quite a bit around Thanksgiving, what with all the turkey recipes floating around.

Posted by: ted welter at October 17, 2007 10:44 PM

Did you ever consider that one reason the Armenians pushed out in 1914 is that they were being persecuted and herded and had been since about 1890?

Posted by: ratbert at October 17, 2007 10:48 PM

Sure. There was ample reason for them to "push out." We have a name for pushing and pushing back, but neither is genocide.

Posted by: oj at October 17, 2007 11:41 PM

Save for a few articles I've read about this subject I can't claim to know much about it. I think without question it was a horrific event. But I'm irritated by guys like Mark Krikorian who merely assert that it was a genocide without question. I challenge anybody to read his piece about this on NRO and find one substantial fact in the whole article that upholds his viewpoint.

If you want to claim genocide then I want to see the specific orders that people of a particular race were to be indiscriminately killed, and I want to hear about the apparatus for killing that existed separately from the apparatus for moving a group of people from one area to another. We have that for the Holocaust. (Wannsee, Auschwitz, etc.) You think any of the Democrats in Congress who are busy trying to torque off the Turks -- when they're not whining about Bush alienating our allies -- could list some of the particulars for us, complete with scholarly citations?

Posted by: Matt Murphy at October 17, 2007 11:43 PM

Shouldn't the OJ position be "There is no Ottoman Empire"? Ratbert is correct, and so my sympathies are with the Armenians.

Posted by: PapayaSF at October 18, 2007 1:01 AM

Yes, the Armenians simply wanted their nation recognized. Denying them one wasn't genocide. It was just a garden variety war. People get killed in wars.

Posted by: oj at October 18, 2007 6:22 AM

Armenians are Christians and the Turks are Moslem. Therein lies the problem. It's similar to the Balkans, but there for politically correct reasons, the Christians have been set up as the bad guys and the Moslems as their victims.

Truth is that Moslems, remnants of the Ottoman Empire which ravaged the area for centuries, murdering Christians, desecrating their churches and conspiring both with the Nazi's and the Commies, are the bad guys in the Balkans

You expect that kind of doublespeak from the Clintonistas, but Bush et al. should know better.

Posted by: erp at October 18, 2007 7:00 AM
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