Biden says Armenian mass killing was genocide- What next for Turkish - US Relations?

[athanaric]

Turkey could easily claim moral high ground over their own ancestors, acknowledge that it happened (without apologising for the actions of a former ideologically different government), distance themselves from it, and watch as their adversaries drop it as an ongoing PR weapon.

The problem is, that's not likely going to happen even if Turkey were to do as you said. Germany and Western Europe (and even the US, Canada, and Australia, or so I hear) have acknowledged and disavowed their past sins and are being exploited with accusations of racism, colonialism, and generally being evil at every turn by other countries, NGOs, and even some of their own citizens. Any semi-intelligent Turk has to be aware of this, and won't be very keen on doing that to himself. I'm pretty sure Turkey won't acknowledge the Armenian Genocide (or any other wrongdoings past and present) until the Western world ceases to let itself be extorted for past genocides or other crimes.
Of course, having a racist thug as president-for-life doesn't help either.

[Cyclops]

... Australia, or so I hear) have acknowledged and disavowed their past sins and are being exploited with accusations of racism, colonialism, and generally being evil at every turn by other countries, NGOs, and even some of their own citizens...

Australian blathering too much alert:

Partially fake news, its a blooming complex subject. The legal basis for the establishment of most of British Australia is the doctrine of Terra Nullius, which has been partially challenged (more by activist judges than plaintiffs) and the considerable fallout from the momentous Mabo and Wik decisions have bot fully played out. My ignorant misunderstanding of the course of events is some Torres Strait Islanders argued for a resumption of traditional ownership of their islands as 1. they had a system of land ownership recognisable as such by British law (villages and farms and kinship systems and sort-of Bossman and Bosslady figures): this was tacitly admitted by the Queensland colonial government when they annexed (not unilaterally occupied) the islands in the 1880's and 2. the legal process of annexation included the assumption of valid claims to land (whether by individuals or, as in this case, clans and tribes) by the annexing authority. The argument contrasted the TSI system with the less British-Law-friendly indigenous Australian Aboriginal systems and concepts which British Law had wiped without consideration through the concept of Terra Nullius. This claim was not accepted by the justices who conjured (from the air seemingly) a concept of "Native Title", which recognised a much wider basket of land "ownership" and use concepts which could include some Australian Aboriginal as well as the more recognisable TSI traditions. A leftie green might say Edie Mabo's case was paternalistically colonised by the judges. As a pragmatic concept its worked (there was a native Title Act quickly written and subsequently knocked into shape with amendments to give some small tracts of mostly useless land to surviving aboriginal groups who could jump through certain hoops, and the TSI groups were able to jump though the most hoops (and got mostly what they were asking for, as well as a pat on the head, but they did not get it the way they asked for it). Terra Nullius was the concept by which British Sovereignty was established in the majority of Australia and its been implicitly overturned in these various decisions and acts without being replaced, so its a bit of a void and no one wants to go near it. The logical next step is a treaty but that will lead (as night follows day) to a written document with all the inherent problems of how language ages and concepts evolve while ink and paper does not. The treaty basis for New Zealand isn't perfect but it works mostly, and the US treaties seem to have provided a stable basis for US sovereignty (even though the treaties themselves weren't worth a piece of ****).

Just on Genocide in Australia, what happened to the many indigenous cultures amounted to genocide in anyone's book: by comparison the Young Turks just lacked the well-oiled and experience massacre machine the British Empire perfected over centuries.

In 19th century Australia it was a multi-pronged approach, with state, church, and private interests acting like a mincing machine, with multiple interlocking approaches adopted. Policing was deliberately feeble at best and actually involved in outright extermination at worst, policies were explicitly aimed at eliminating Indigenous cultures, and private individuals involved in government sponsored programs like mission stations openly stated their institutions amounted to palliation for a dying race. Academic and government records of events range from minimal to absolutely silent, to the extent the adjective "Orwellian" might (for once) be justified: Indigenous Australians became unpeople.

From a legal standpoint building a country on an easily disprovable lie, and supporting that lie with elaborate and enduring cruelty and dishonesty is poor governance, its better to eliminate risk (and the instability inherent in fundamental constitutional flaws and voids) with remediation and establishing a stronger basis of rule.

I accept Erdogan lacks the authority or prestige to undertake such a task for Turkiyye. I hope the find leaders and reinforce their society to the point it can address this past injustice, because from the little I see Turks are mostly lovely people and deserve to live in peace and justice.

[EmperorBatman999]

I think it's quite horrible to claim that the Armenians "had it coming" because some of them (a small fraction of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire) fought in the Russian army. In fact, this is similar to certain aspects of nazi propaganda about Jews "undermining Germany".

That's not where the similarities between the plight of the Armenians and the situation against the Jews ends, either.

Prior to World War I, the Armenians had become hugely successful within the Ottoman Empire, and were among the wealthiest and best educated demographics in the country, largely thanks to the Tanzimat Reforms which institutionalized religious equality across the Empire. They were especially dominant in most of the empire's urban centers, whether it was Istanbul, Damascus, or Jerusalem. In Constantinople/Istanbul, all the banks were owned by Armenians or Greeks; there was not a single one owned by Muslim Turks. At the same time, Enver Pasha and Talat Pasha were rising through the ranks of the Ottoman military and administration, and they internalized this imbalance in light of developing a new sense of Turkish nationalism. Ultimately, they and their fellow conspirators concluded that any groups who outdid the Turks had to be punished, if not outright expelled.

We can think of this how many in Jews in Vienna, Austria, for example, also became immensely successful once discriminatory barriers against them were dismantled. By 1900, some gentile Austrians such as Bürgermeister Karl Lueger thought something had to be done about this successful group of bankers, imperial administrators, musicians, and army officers, and some young men like Hitler listened to what Lueger had to say. Success in one group breeds insecurity among the other, especially when that other group thinks they should be the ones in charge (after all, was Ottoman Turkey not governed by the descendants of a Turkic warlord, and was the official language not Turkish? Was the Austrian Kaiser not himself a German Christian Austrian, and was the empire not a Germanic one?)

The Young Turks, and the Nazis, concocted a similar myth to get payback against their chosen rival group: the myth of the "Stab in the Back." Only such a Big Lie as this could convince the public to join them in a national punishment of the minority. Simultaneously, both these ultranationalists felt that their enemy was somehow paradoxically both superior (shadowy leadership figures) while also being culturally, ethnically, or evolutionarily inferior; the former gives cause for the punishment, the latter gives the confidence to carry it out.

And sadly, these ideas have yet to be eradicated today. The Turks and Azeris cheered the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh as a chance to "finish the job," and we know very well about the widespread nature of conspiratorial anti-semitism which festers in the West.

[antaeus]

The problem is, that's not likely going to happen even if Turkey were to do as you said. Germany and Western Europe (and even the US, Canada, and Australia, or so I hear) have acknowledged and disavowed their past sins and are being exploited with accusations of racism, colonialism, and generally being evil at every turn by other countries, NGOs, and even some of their own citizens. Any semi-intelligent Turk has to be aware of this, and won't be very keen on doing that to himself. I'm pretty sure Turkey won't acknowledge the Armenian Genocide (or any other wrongdoings past and present) until the Western world ceases to let itself be extorted for past genocides or other crimes.
Of course, having a racist thug as president-for-life doesn't help either.

That's a fair call.

Certainly though Australia, as per Cyclops' post, still has a lot of work to do. But, as per the stoush earlier this year when China (in classic whataboutery defence of it's actions in Xinjiang) accused Australia of double standards over treatment of indigenous people - the Australian government could quickly point to a reconciliation process that is both ongoing and wide ranging. The same is true of the situation in Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, even the United States. An acknowledgement of past wrongs has allowed those wrongs to be moved into the WIP column - which is good PR. Turkey's government are unable to do this, so they have no response to ongoing use of the genocide against them other than "it didn't happen" or "they did bad things too so they deserved it (but it didn't happen)"

As per the situation in most of these other countries, public attitudes towards reconciliation or acknowledgement can change on a coin flip. There is nothing inherent about Turkish society that prevents it from moving past the genocide. This is entirely about the leadership of the day. You're correct to a degree that Turkey is unlikely to acknowledge the genocide any time soon - but your reasoning is incorrect - it has nothing to do with the Western World or any weird extortion over past crimes and everything to do with Erdogan's framing of nationalism - which seeks to highlight long Turkish history under the Ottomans and downplay short Turkish history under secular leadership. As I finished my last post - any introspection on the past for Erdogan, is to look for examples of strength, not for weakness - and genocide is an act of extreme societal weakness and insecurity.

[PointOfViewGun]

That's not where the similarities between the plight of the Armenians and the situation against the Jews ends, either.

Prior to World War I, the Armenians had become hugely successful within the Ottoman Empire, and were among the wealthiest and best educated demographics in the country, largely thanks to the Tanzimat Reforms which institutionalized religious equality across the Empire. They were especially dominant in most of the empire's urban centers, whether it was Istanbul, Damascus, or Jerusalem. In Constantinople/Istanbul, all the banks were owned by Armenians or Greeks; there was not a single one owned by Muslim Turks. At the same time, Enver Pasha and Talat Pasha were rising through the ranks of the Ottoman military and administration, and they internalized this imbalance in light of developing a new sense of Turkish nationalism. Ultimately, they and their fellow conspirators concluded that any groups who outdid the Turks had to be punished, if not outright expelled.

We can think of this how many in Jews in Vienna, Austria, for example, also became immensely successful once discriminatory barriers against them were dismantled. By 1900, some gentile Austrians such as Bürgermeister Karl Lueger thought something had to be done about this successful group of bankers, imperial administrators, musicians, and army officers, and some young men like Hitler listened to what Lueger had to say. Success in one group breeds insecurity among the other, especially when that other group thinks they should be the ones in charge (after all, was Ottoman Turkey not governed by the descendants of a Turkic warlord, and was the official language not Turkish? Was the Austrian Kaiser not himself a German Christian Austrian, and was the empire not a Germanic one?)

The Young Turks, and the Nazis, concocted a similar myth to get payback against their chosen rival group: the myth of the "Stab in the Back." Only such a Big Lie as this could convince the public to join them in a national punishment of the minority. Simultaneously, both these ultranationalists felt that their enemy was somehow paradoxically both superior (shadowy leadership figures) while also being culturally, ethnically, or evolutionarily inferior; the former gives cause for the punishment, the latter gives the confidence to carry it out.

And sadly, these ideas have yet to be eradicated today. The Turks and Azeris cheered the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh as a chance to "finish the job," and we know very well about the widespread nature of conspiratorial anti-semitism which festers in the West.

You're propagating a myth that is not grounded on reality. If the idea was that Armenians owned more wealth than Turks or that they controlled commerce then it makes little sense that some of the least wealthy provinces were subjected to relocations while the capital Constantinople and powerhouse Smyrna were not.

You also call "Stab in the Back" a myth. This implies that you think Armenian groups had no intention to work with the Russians, that the reports of Armenian groups conducting guerilla fighting against Ottomans didn't happen, that Armenians made no attempts to rebel in various places. Yet, all of these are well-documented. Even before the relocation order Tehcir Law was signed, rebellion in eastern Anatolia was already ongoing in force. The relocation order was signed while there was an armed Armenian rebellion, not before, and it only covered the provinces of conflict close to the battle front with the Russians.

[EmperorBatman999]

You're propagating a myth that is not grounded on reality. If the idea was that Armenians owned more wealth than Turks or that they controlled commerce then it makes little sense that some of the least wealthy provinces were subjected to relocations while the capital Constantinople and powerhouse Smyrna were not.

You also call "Stab in the Back" a myth. This implies that you think Armenian groups had no intention to work with the Russians, that the reports of Armenian groups conducting guerilla fighting against Ottomans didn't happen, that Armenians made no attempts to rebel in various places. Yet, all of these are well-documented. Even before the relocation order Tehcir Law was signed, rebellion in eastern Anatolia was already ongoing in force. The relocation order was signed while there was an armed Armenian rebellion, not before, and it only covered the provinces of conflict close to the battle front with the Russians.

I learned this in a graduate-level seminar taught by a Turkish professor who is an expert on the Ottoman Empire during World War I. You don't get very far in academia spouting out myths; peer reviewers tend to not like that.

More than 60,000 Armenian men served in the Ottoman military. In 1914, following full mobilization, the army reached 1,250,000 men. As of the Ottoman Census of 1905-1906, the total Ottoman population was more than 18.5 million people, with 15 million of those being Muslim, and about 2 million of those being Armenian split between the Greek Orthodox and Armenian Churches (the Ottoman censuses were based on religion, not ethnicity or language). So 3% of the Armenian population was in the army, and between 5% and 6% of the Turkish population was in the army (from just about 8% of the total Muslim population): Note, I cannot get the precise statistic because apparently the precise ethnic makeup of the entire military wasn't documented in anything I can find online.

You can similarly see how the Germans even during World War I tried to blame the war's hardships and failures on the Jews in the infamous Judenzählung ("Jew Count"); the study was never officially published because they found that Jews were actually over-represented in the number of servicemen compared their overall part of the population, suggesting that the Jews were actually enthusiastic, patriotic, and willing participants in the German armed forces.

There was a political complication with Russia: Yes, they did promise the Armenians better treatment than the Ottomans, even just on the fact of being fellow Christians alone. There were Armenians in the Russian army recruited from both sides of the border, and there were Armenian guerrillas helping the Russians. And many of those Armenians would've had good reason in living memory to help the Russians: Sultan Abdülhamid II ordered the creation of a mounted auxiliary force comprised of Kurdish warriors called the Hamidian Cavalry whose sole assignment was to harass Armenian communities. Now, in the Russo-Turkish War of 1878, the Armenians came into the crosshairs of Ottoman Turks because, just like what happened later in World War I, they were accused of helping the Russians. However, the Hamidian Cavalry was over formed in 1890, long after that conflict had ended and long before it looked like there was going to be another conflict with Russia. Between 1894 and 1896, the Hamidian Cavalry launched a long string of massacres against the Armenians, and this is generally considered the actual start of the Armenian Genocide. At this time, there was no war with Russia and no evidential reason to suspect that the Armenians were plotting to rebel; the Armenian nationalist parties had little widespread support. The Ottomans instead provoked the Armenians into outrage while instigating the Kurds into attacking the Armenians by emphasizing territorial disputes between the Kurds and Armenians, all of which set the stage for a wave of massacres which killed thousands of Armenians.

So yeah, naturally in 1914, the Ottomans' actions 20 years earlier proved to the Armenians that they were no longer safe in the Ottoman Empire, so some did look for outside options, while others tried to assert their loyalty to the Sultan yet more.

We may also look to a similar, and much more significant, rebellion in the Ottoman Empire and the Arab uprising. Although the Ottomans still retained a sizeable Arab population in Syria, Lebanon, and northern Mesopotamia, close to the battlefront against Britain, the Ottomans did not make an effort to remove Arab populations into the interior in order to prevent them from siding with T.E. Lawrence's forces. The Young Turks' ire was an ethno-religious one, and it was targeted straight at the Armenians; this clear and biased targeting is the hallmark of genocide (the intentional removal of a specific ethnic group on the grounds of religious or ethnic causes), and Turkish troops gleefully carried it out with massacres and carnal assaults on the expelled Armenians they were escorting.

[PointOfViewGun]

I learned this in a graduate-level seminar taught by a Turkish professor who is an expert on the Ottoman Empire during World War I. You don't get very far in academia spouting out myths; peer reviewers tend to not like that.

More than 60,000 Armenian men served in the Ottoman military. In 1914, following full mobilization, the army reached 1,250,000 men. As of the Ottoman Census of 1905-1906, the total Ottoman population was more than 18.5 million people, with 15 million of those being Muslim, and about 2 million of those being Armenian split between the Greek Orthodox and Armenian Churches (the Ottoman censuses were based on religion, not ethnicity or language). So 3% of the Armenian population was in the army, and between 5% and 6% of the Turkish population was in the army (from just about 8% of the total Muslim population): Note, I cannot get the precise statistic because apparently the precise ethnic makeup of the entire military wasn't documented in anything I can find online.

You can similarly see how the Germans even during World War I tried to blame the war's hardships and failures on the Jews in the infamous Judenzählung ("Jew Count"); the study was never officially published because they found that Jews were actually over-represented in the number of servicemen compared their overall part of the population, suggesting that the Jews were actually enthusiastic, patriotic, and willing participants in the German armed forces.

There was a political complication with Russia: Yes, they did promise the Armenians better treatment than the Ottomans, even just on the fact of being fellow Christians alone. There were Armenians in the Russian army recruited from both sides of the border, and there were Armenian guerrillas helping the Russians. And many of those Armenians would've had good reason in living memory to help the Russians: Sultan Abdülhamid II ordered the creation of a mounted auxiliary force comprised of Kurdish warriors called the Hamidian Cavalry whose sole assignment was to harass Armenian communities. Now, in the Russo-Turkish War of 1878, the Armenians came into the crosshairs of Ottoman Turks because, just like what happened later in World War I, they were accused of helping the Russians. However, the Hamidian Cavalry was over formed in 1890, long after that conflict had ended and long before it looked like there was going to be another conflict with Russia. Between 1894 and 1896, the Hamidian Cavalry launched a long string of massacres against the Armenians, and this is generally considered the actual start of the Armenian Genocide. At this time, there was no war with Russia and no evidential reason to suspect that the Armenians were plotting to rebel; the Armenian nationalist parties had little widespread support. The Ottomans instead provoked the Armenians into outrage while instigating the Kurds into attacking the Armenians by emphasizing territorial disputes between the Kurds and Armenians, all of which set the stage for a wave of massacres which killed thousands of Armenians.

So yeah, naturally in 1914, the Ottomans' actions 20 years earlier proved to the Armenians that they were no longer safe in the Ottoman Empire, so some did look for outside options, while others tried to assert their loyalty to the Sultan yet more.

We may also look to a similar, and much more significant, rebellion in the Ottoman Empire and the Arab uprising. Although the Ottomans still retained a sizeable Arab population in Syria, Lebanon, and northern Mesopotamia, close to the battlefront against Britain, the Ottomans did not make an effort to remove Arab populations into the interior in order to prevent them from siding with T.E. Lawrence's forces. The Young Turks' ire was an ethno-religious one, and it was targeted straight at the Armenians; this clear and biased targeting is the hallmark of genocide (the intentional removal of a specific ethnic group on the grounds of religious or ethnic causes), and Turkish troops gleefully carried it out with massacres and carnal assaults on the expelled Armenians they were escorting.

Fortunately, the nationality of a person, or his academic status, doesn't change the facts of the matter. If I had a guess on who that professor is I would say that it is Taner Akçam. Am I right?

The concept of blaming the Armenians for Ottoman dawn fall was not really shared back then nor its how we studied the last years of Ottomans in school. If anything, the three pashas, Talat, Cemal and Enver, are the ones blamed for pulling Ottoman Empire into the war. Their veneration is rather a new phenemenon coming with AKP's attempts to revive Ottoman nostalgia. Sure, Armenian involvement was one of the contributing factors in Russian advances in the eastern front but everywhere else there was little involvement, hence, the relocation process was largely limited to the eastern provinces. Even in the army, the initial efforts were not to divorce the Armenians from the military altogether but to relieve those that had access to sensitive military information.

Extending our timeline to 1895 in addressing the Russian link is rather an attempt at moving the lenses. The fact of the matter is that there was a major effort on both sides of the front lines with Russians to threaten the security of Ottoman territory. Are you trying to justify their actions? That has little relevance to your initial point of trivializing military reasons for Ottomans wanting to relocate the Armenians. If Armenian actions were successful we'd likely have a case where no Turks or Kurds lived in eastern Anatolia today though hardly anyone would describe them as a genocide because reasons.

Actually, Arabs were moved in certain places as well under the same law around the same time. The Tehcir Law did not indicate any ethnicity. A number of Arabs were relocated from Syria and Medina to inner Anatolia. Their topic is often ignored in place of the Armenians. In fact, you speak of Armenians being described as the "stab in the back" but if you were to grow up in Turkey you'd realize that that description is reserved for Arabs for their revolt. However, relocating the Arabs from the Levant was not a feasible operation compared to relocating Armenians of eastern provinces.

[EmperorBatman999]

Fortunately, the nationality of a person, or his academic status, doesn't change the facts of the matter. If I had a guess on who that professor is I would say that it is Taner Akçam. Am I right?

No, it wasn't Taner Akcam, but instead Mustafa Aksakal.

The concept of blaming the Armenians for Ottoman dawn fall was not really shared back then nor its how we studied the last years of Ottomans in school. If anything, the three pashas, Talat, Cemal and Enver, are the ones blamed for pulling Ottoman Empire into the war. Their veneration is rather a new phenemenon coming with AKP's attempts to revive Ottoman nostalgia. Sure, Armenian involvement was one of the contributing factors in Russian advances in the eastern front but everywhere else there was little involvement, hence, the relocation process was largely limited to the eastern provinces. Even in the army, the initial efforts were not to divorce the Armenians from the military altogether but to relieve those that had access to sensitive military information.

I'm not speaking of the root causes of the Ottoman downfall, which go back really to the late-1600s, if not with the discovery of the Americas and the De Gama route to India, which together invalidated the Ottomans' cash cow of the Silk Road. What is for certain is that the Tanzimat caused in imbalance where the people who were previously (and legally ordained to be) the pinnacle of society were losing that position in light of others' success. We can see across multiple societies between the 1800s and today that such dynamic shifts in social/cultural/political/economic power trigger frictions, which lead to resentments, which then lead to bursts of outrage, which then can manifest in their most extreme form as genocide.

Additionally, the Genocide went far beyond the initial stated orders for strategic relocations. The soldiers used their power and resentment towards the Armenian people to savage them every step of the way towards Syria, and their Young Turk leaders allowed and encouraged it to happen. Strategic concerns made for a convenient excuse to do what the Ottoman leadership had been trying to find a way to achieve for decades. They couldn't do it initially in peacetime because it could lead to invasion by the Europeans, who had already come to the rescue of the Greeks, Maronite Lebanese, Serbs, and Bulgarians throughout the 19th century. That didn't mean that Ottoman officials didn't want to, however!

Extending our timeline to 1895 in addressing the Russian link is rather an attempt at moving the lenses. The fact of the matter is that there was a major effort on both sides of the front lines with Russians to threaten the security of Ottoman territory. Are you trying to justify their actions? That has little relevance to your initial point of trivializing military reasons for Ottomans wanting to relocate the Armenians. If Armenian actions were successful we'd likely have a case where no Turks or Kurds lived in eastern Anatolia today though hardly anyone would describe them as a genocide because reasons.

We're talking history here, and historical events tend to have links to prior events. In this case, the lens of 1915-1918 is myopic. We need to see the Armenian Genocide which came into full force in 1915 as the end result of a progression of prior events, events which lay within the redistribution of social power post-Tanzimat. The eastern Armenians were convenient targets for Ottoman leaders to direct their hatred for the whole group, like how the Nazis were particularly harsh towards the shtetl Jews of Poland and Russia, although their rhetoric referred mostly to Berlin and Viennese bankers and other capitalist social elites.

Also, the last part is getting into counterfactuals. Maybe we would talk about the Turkish and Kurdish Genocides of 1918/1919 had they happened, but the Armenians never got their chance, so we can't make villains out of them for an act they never committed.

Actually, Arabs were moved in certain places as well under the same law around the same time. The Tehcir Law did not indicate any ethnicity. A number of Arabs were relocated from Syria and Medina to inner Anatolia. Their topic is often ignored in place of the Armenians. In fact, you speak of Armenians being described as the "stab in the back" but if you were to grow up in Turkey you'd realize that that description is reserved for Arabs for their revolt. However, relocating the Arabs from the Levant was not a feasible operation compared to relocating Armenians of eastern provinces.

Point granted here, the removal of the Arabs receives far less coverage in the historiography. Still, I'd like to know about what happened with the removal of Arabs. Did Ottoman officials respect them enough because of their religion to just simply escort them out of the battle zone, or did they also commit physical atrocities as they moved the Arabs? What defines the Armenian Genocide are two components: the forced removal from ancient ethnic lands, and the brutality visited upon the Armenians by the Ottoman soldiers overseeing the removal. And we can't doubt the atrocities visited upon the Armenians, either: take, for example, Armin Wegner, a German medic imbedded into the Ottoman Army who witnessed the genocide. He still wrote about what happened, despite the fact his nation was allied with the Ottomans. Wegner also tried to stand up against the Holocaust, as he knew exactly what would happen as he had seen it all before.

[enoch]

Point Of View Gun. I have read up on this and the Armenian genocide happened. The testimony from Turks alone damns them as knowingly guilty. You are rational on other topics. The Turkish nationalism is out of character from your other posts. Is this an endemic problem in Turkey?

Before World War II, the Armenian Genocide was widely considered the greatest atrocity in history. As of 2021, 30 countries have recognized the events as genocide. Against the academic consensus, Turkey denies that the deportation of Armenians was a genocide or wrongful act.

Straight from Wikipedia. No controversy notes nor anything. Universally accepted as truth by basically every country that matters and isn’t near completely totalitarian. Why argue against something so easily provable or rather if you are going to go with Flat Earth or something nominally believable.

[PointOfViewGun]

No, it wasn't Taner Akcam, but instead Mustafa Aksakal.

Interesting. I went through his work catalogue but can't find any actual work on the subject. In fact, in his book "The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War" the name Armenian passes only a few times. So, I don't what kind of work he has done on the subject, nor what kind of arguments he has used. However, if he, at any point, used the argument that Armenians were targeted because they controlled the commerce in the empire its mind bogglingly troubling as that argument has no logic to it given how Armenians in commercial centers like Constantinople and Smyrna went largely untouched by the relocation efforts.

I'm not speaking of the root causes of the Ottoman downfall, which go back really to the late-1600s, if not with the discovery of the Americas and the De Gama route to India, which together invalidated the Ottomans' cash cow of the Silk Road. What is for certain is that the Tanzimat caused in imbalance where the people who were previously (and legally ordained to be) the pinnacle of society were losing that position in light of others' success. We can see across multiple societies between the 1800s and today that such dynamic shifts in social/cultural/political/economic power trigger frictions, which lead to resentments, which then lead to bursts of outrage, which then can manifest in their most extreme form as genocide.

Additionally, the Genocide went far beyond the initial stated orders for strategic relocations. The soldiers used their power and resentment towards the Armenian people to savage them every step of the way towards Syria, and their Young Turk leaders allowed and encouraged it to happen. Strategic concerns made for a convenient excuse to do what the Ottoman leadership had been trying to find a way to achieve for decades. They couldn't do it initially in peacetime because it could lead to invasion by the Europeans, who had already come to the rescue of the Greeks, Maronite Lebanese, Serbs, and Bulgarians throughout the 19th century. That didn't mean that Ottoman officials didn't want to, however!

Two points to make here. One of logic and an other of historical fact. Logic first. You argued earlier how Armenians were massacred by Hamidian regiments. At that time there was no war. Now you argue that Ottomans could massacre Armenians because there was war. The two don't sit well together. Historical fact now. You claim that Young Turk leaders, the three pashas, allowed and encouraged killings. This is blatantly false. There is amplitude of evidence to suggest that they tried to scramble resources to help the relocation proccess. Turkish courts martials were set up in 1915 to combat abuses. While highly limited in effect they were still carried with over a thousand people put on trial and at least a few dozen hanged.

We're talking history here, and historical events tend to have links to prior events. In this case, the lens of 1915-1918 is myopic. We need to see the Armenian Genocide which came into full force in 1915 as the end result of a progression of prior events, events which lay within the redistribution of social power post-Tanzimat. The eastern Armenians were convenient targets for Ottoman leaders to direct their hatred for the whole group, like how the Nazis were particularly harsh towards the shtetl Jews of Poland and Russia, although their rhetoric referred mostly to Berlin and Viennese bankers and other capitalist social elites.

Also, the last part is getting into counterfactuals. Maybe we would talk about the Turkish and Kurdish Genocides of 1918/1919 had they happened, but the Armenians never got their chance, so we can't make villains out of them for an act they never committed.

You're scrambling there. You didn't jump to 1895 as a standalone point. You jumped there in response to the Russian connection. Now you're trying to make sense of it. Within that context it can only be regarded as a deflection. The main point was that there was a considerable threat from the Armenians in the eastern provinces as many either joined the Russians directly to fight under their banner or stayed within Ottoman empire to help the Russians through guerilla warfare or outright rebellions. Ottomans saw this as an existential threat for the eastern front and acted within the norms of the century by conducting a relocation effort. The purpose of trying to come up with alternative reasons for Armenian's demise is nothing but an effort to vilify the Ottomans.

What I mentioned about was not completely a hypothetical. Many innocent Turks and Kurds did lost their lives at the hands of Armenians. Just like many Armenians talk about their ancestors getting killed by Turks or Kurds, there are many Turks and Kurds that can talk about their ancestors getting killed by Armenians. I too have such stories in my family both in the east at the hands of Armenians and in the west at the hands of Greeks. Part of my family had to emigrate to Istanbul purely because a great grand father's family was burned along with his village by Armenians, for example. You want me to ignore their death and put all the spotlight on Armenians. It's not genuine. The hypothetical part is that if Armenians succeeded, there would be many more death, not that there wasn't any death to begin with.

Point granted here, the removal of the Arabs receives far less coverage in the historiography. Still, I'd like to know about what happened with the removal of Arabs. Did Ottoman officials respect them enough because of their religion to just simply escort them out of the battle zone, or did they also commit physical atrocities as they moved the Arabs? What defines the Armenian Genocide are two components: the forced removal from ancient ethnic lands, and the brutality visited upon the Armenians by the Ottoman soldiers overseeing the removal. And we can't doubt the atrocities visited upon the Armenians, either: take, for example, Armin Wegner, a German medic imbedded into the Ottoman Army who witnessed the genocide. He still wrote about what happened, despite the fact his nation was allied with the Ottomans. Wegner also tried to stand up against the Holocaust, as he knew exactly what would happen as he had seen it all before.

There is little details on Arabs that were relocated at that time as most of the attention is given to Armenians in the academia. They likely suffered similarly but the fact they were much less in numbers made it easier for them. You could say that them being Muslim would make a difference, though not all Arabs were Muslim, mind you. However, the empire was not exactly homogeneous. While Christians were the minority in most places they were still present in all provinces. Travel to any part of the empire and you'd find a church.

What Armin T. Wegner's pictures showed was that people suffered in the region. His testimonies, however, are often found untrustworthy. His letter to the US president showed his poetic bias greatly as he claimed that Armenian women were cooking their newborn children to feed themselves. As Lewy points out in his book I recommended earlier, Wegner was a poet before being a medic. Fortunately, the problem with him doesn't stop there. His original diary become available after his death in 1978. Martin Tamcke made a detailed analysis of it in 1993. He found that there was "numerous discrepancies as well as important differences of substance when contrasted with other available accounts of conditions in the Mesopotamian camps." He concluded that Wegner's work "belonged not to history but to "realms of legends.""

One major problem with this whole topic is that published testimonies of people from that time differ greatly from their personal notes or actual communications from that time. We see this happening with way too many of these "eye witnesses." Yet, you neither have the inclination to check up on them. They're not readily available as well because unfortunately history is decided by popularity.

Point Of View Gun. I have read up on this and the Armenian genocide happened. The testimony from Turks alone damns them as knowingly guilty. You are rational on other topics. The Turkish nationalism is out of character from your other posts. Is this an endemic problem in Turkey?
Before World War II, the Armenian Genocide was widely considered the greatest atrocity in history. As of 2021, 30 countries have recognized the events as genocide. Against the academic consensus, Turkey denies that the deportation of Armenians was a genocide or wrongful act.
Straight from Wikipedia. No controversy notes nor anything. Universally accepted as truth by basically every country that matters and isn’t near completely totalitarian. Why argue against something so easily provable or rather if you are going to go with Flat Earth or something nominally believable.

Sigh... Wikipedia... I watched over the years how Wikipedia became religiously zealot about the Armenian allegations. Any mention of refuting sources started to disappear one by one. Any historian that is highly referenced in any other article about the Ottoman empire as experts are pushed to the denial page. Wikipedia is the foremost propaganda tool for the Armenians thanks to the large number of Armenian and Greek editors.

[nhytgbvfeco2]

the relocation process was largely limited to the eastern provinces.

Lets not forget how upon occupying foreign territory (North-western Iran) the Ottomans slaughtered the local Armenians.

[enoch]

Sigh... Wikipedia... I watched over the years how Wikipedia became religiously zealot about the Armenian allegations. Any mention of refuting sources started to disappear one by one. Any historian that is highly referenced in any other article about the Ottoman empire as experts are pushed to the denial page. Wikipedia is the foremost propaganda tool for the Armenians thanks to the large number of Armenian and Greek editors.

I was unaware of the Greek & Armenian Wikipedia conspiracy. So it’s just fake news and your alternate facts are the real ones. Maybe I have heard this before somewhere.

[EmperorBatman999]

Interesting. I went through his work catalogue but can't find any actual work on the subject. In fact, in his book "The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War" the name Armenian passes only a few times. So, I don't what kind of work he has done on the subject, nor what kind of arguments he has used. However, if he, at any point, used the argument that Armenians were targeted because they controlled the commerce in the empire its mind bogglingly troubling as that argument has no logic to it given how Armenians in commercial centers like Constantinople and Smyrna went largely untouched by the relocation efforts.

For academic clarity, it is I who is forwarding the commercial/financial component. What this professor did discuss in this course, however, was the rise of pro-Turkish nationalism among the CUP, and Enver Pasha in particular was highly inspired by German nationalism, which he tried to model in the Turkish context. The works he curated explored this nationalist component and were frank about Ottoman attacks, whether in Armenia or the Balkans, or other contexts.

Touching into Habsburg history, Kann is his classic dual-volume work The Multinational Empire suggests that German nationalism was the prototype for all the nationalist movements in the Balkans, which can be used as a supporting point to this. Kann's work is rustic and he's Austrian, so he has a clear bias, but it's a good starting point for understanding what is going on here.

We saw in particular how in the 19th century, German nationalism was still striving to unify all German peoples across the world, and increasingly after Karl Lueger, cleanse German society of non-German elements, namely in this case the Jews, who occupied important positions of power and wealth in society. The pan-nationalism manifested itself as Turanism, while the internally-focused nationalism of the three Pashas concerned itself with making the Ottoman Empire a more Turkish state. It's very likely that Enver heard the arguments of the contemporary Lueger in his own exploration of German nationalism.

My own reasoning on financial/commercial envy theory combines the pro-Turkish nationalist viewpoint, as well as Thomas Sowell's remarks on the economic success of Armenians compared to Turks in the late Ottoman Empire, all framed in the comparative light of how envy played a part in other genocides, especially the Jewish Holocaust. Sowell was trying to make a comparative point to the US context where certain groups have cultural attributes that help them become more successful and productive in a society, especially when the legalistic barriers to that success are removed. In this context, Sowell likens the case of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire to the Jews in Germany and the Habsburg Empire; both were prominent minorities that tended to be better off on average than the majority especially in urban areas. Maybe not so much in the hinterlands, however, as there was widespread poverty and subsistence agriculture among those populations in the Armenian Highlands and Galicia respectively -- we have to intellectually recognize that difference. Perhaps Sowell's argument is somewhat deterministic (some minority groups have cultural attributes which make them more successful, and therefore become more successful than the average population), but it is an interesting dimension.

Nationalism needs an enemy to gain support and to survive. When the nation-state has yet to be formed, that enemy is external (take, for example, Czech resentment against their German overlords). Once the nation-state is created, or in the process of being created, that dislike aimed towards an internal group which is then outcasted and vilified. People in the German Empire turned to anti-semitism, while in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the position of the Germans was much less secure by the 1890s, that nationalistic disdain was aimed at Czechs, Poles, and Slovenes, as well as the Jews.

Two points to make here. One of logic and an other of historical fact. Logic first. You argued earlier how Armenians were massacred by Hamidian regiments. At that time there was no war. Now you argue that Ottomans could massacre Armenians because there was war. The two don't sit well together. Historical fact now. You claim that Young Turk leaders, the three pashas, allowed and encouraged killings. This is blatantly false. There is amplitude of evidence to suggest that they tried to scramble resources to help the relocation proccess. Turkish courts martials were set up in 1915 to combat abuses. While highly limited in effect they were still carried with over a thousand people put on trial and at least a few dozen hanged.

You admit then that there were atrocities committed against the Armenians, and atrocities committed on such a large enough scale to have implicated more than 1,000 people.

The removal and attacks directed towards the Armenian people were committed on a mass scale and motivated by a fear and loathing towards a specific group because of their ethnic characteristics. That is genocide.

You're scrambling there. You didn't jump to 1895 as a standalone point. You jumped there in response to the Russian connection. Now you're trying to make sense of it. Within that context it can only be regarded as a deflection. The main point was that there was a considerable threat from the Armenians in the eastern provinces as many either joined the Russians directly to fight under their banner or stayed within Ottoman empire to help the Russians through guerilla warfare or outright rebellions. Ottomans saw this as an existential threat for the eastern front and acted within the norms of the century by conducting a relocation effort. The purpose of trying to come up with alternative reasons for Armenian's demise is nothing but an effort to vilify the Ottomans.

The argument that the Armenians were an existential threat as justifying their forced removal doesn't fly, no matter how tangible the threat might seem; the Nazis saw the Jews as an existential threat to the Reich and undertook the Final Solution to solve it, and they were rightly condemned at Nuremberg, as the Ottoman officials were rightly condemned in Constantinople in 1919/1920. Nationalists always argue that some group is going to ally with the nation's enemies, and that the threat of that group is to be neutralized, either by forced removal, mass-murder, or both.

What I mentioned about was not completely a hypothetical. Many innocent Turks and Kurds did lost their lives at the hands of Armenians. Just like many Armenians talk about their ancestors getting killed by Turks or Kurds, there are many Turks and Kurds that can talk about their ancestors getting killed by Armenians. I too have such stories in my family both in the east at the hands of Armenians and in the west at the hands of Greeks. Part of my family had to emigrate to Istanbul purely because a great grand father's family was burned along with his village by Armenians, for example. You want me to ignore their death and put all the spotlight on Armenians. It's not genuine. The hypothetical part is that if Armenians succeeded, there would be many more death, not that there wasn't any death to begin with.

What could have triggered these attacks by Armenians against Turks and Kurds? These groups had been relatively peaceful for centuries, outside of the occasional territorial dispute among these groups. If they happened after the Hamidian attacks, then the killings were done out of a reaction to what was happening to them. Were Jewish partisans in the Polish/Belarusian wilderness committing genocide against the Germans when they attacked their patrols?

There is little details on Arabs that were relocated at that time as most of the attention is given to Armenians in the academia. They likely suffered similarly but the fact they were much less in numbers made it easier for them. You could say that them being Muslim would make a difference, though not all Arabs were Muslim, mind you. However, the empire was not exactly homogeneous. While Christians were the minority in most places they were still present in all provinces. Travel to any part of the empire and you'd find a church.

What Armin T. Wegner's pictures showed was that people suffered in the region. His testimonies, however, are often found untrustworthy. His letter to the US president showed his poetic bias greatly as he claimed that Armenian women were cooking their newborn children to feed themselves. As Lewy points out in his book I recommended earlier, Wegner was a poet before being a medic. Fortunately, the problem with him doesn't stop there. His original diary become available after his death in 1978. Martin Tamcke made a detailed analysis of it in 1993. He found that there was "numerous discrepancies as well as important differences of substance when contrasted with other available accounts of conditions in the Mesopotamian camps." He concluded that Wegner's work "belonged not to history but to "realms of legends.""

One major problem with this whole topic is that published testimonies of people from that time differ greatly from their personal notes or actual communications from that time. We see this happening with way too many of these "eye witnesses." Yet, you neither have the inclination to check up on them. They're not readily available as well because unfortunately history is decided by popularity.

Your reliance on official reports and orders is also problematic. Official reports tend to, by their nature, be self-flattering accounts of the situation at the front. They hide as much as they emphasize. Orders can be similarly deceptive, and often contain euphemisms which the recipients are supposed to understand. Think, for example, how the Germans sent dissidents and Jews into "safekeeping," or that the Soviets would execute political opponents under the orders to "liquidate" the target.

[PointOfViewGun]

For academic clarity, it is I who is forwarding the commercial/financial component. What this professor did discuss in this course, however, was the rise of pro-Turkish nationalism among the CUP, and Enver Pasha in particular was highly inspired by German nationalism, which he tried to model in the Turkish context. The works he curated explored this nationalist component and were frank about Ottoman attacks, whether in Armenia or the Balkans, or other contexts.

Touching into Habsburg history, Kann is his classic dual-volume work The Multinational Empire suggests that German nationalism was the prototype for all the nationalist movements in the Balkans, which can be used as a supporting point to this. Kann's work is rustic and he's Austrian, so he has a clear bias, but it's a good starting point for understanding what is going on here.

We saw in particular how in the 19th century, German nationalism was still striving to unify all German peoples across the world, and increasingly after Karl Lueger, cleanse German society of non-German elements, namely in this case the Jews, who occupied important positions of power and wealth in society. The pan-nationalism manifested itself as Turanism, while the internally-focused nationalism of the three Pashas concerned itself with making the Ottoman Empire a more Turkish state; Mustafa Kemal only really solved the quest-line by throwing out the Ottoman Empire entirely and starting over with Turkey which was more geographically focused on the region which had the most Turks; the rest solved itself with the population exchanges after the Greco-Turkish War, and there were far fewer Armenians than there had been in the region prior to 1915, so the expulsion solved what it was intended to do. The only problem remaining were the Kurds; I suspect the modern Turkish state realizes that by admitting the Armenian Genocide, it'll also prompt a scholarly investigation into what they're doing against the Kurds.

Most of this has nothing to do with the genocide allegations. All it does is to tailor a story based on a pre-chosen conclusion. I also need to point out that Armenians were not expelled from Ottoman Empire like Jews were from Spain. They were relocated within the empire.

My own reasoning on financial/commercial envy theory combines the pro-Turkish nationalist viewpoint, as well as Thomas Sowell's remarks on the economic success of Armenians compared to Turks in the late Ottoman Empire, all framed in the comparative light of how envy played a part in other genocides, especially the Jewish Holocaust. Sowell was trying to make a comparative point to the US context where certain groups have cultural attributes that help them become more successful and productive in a society, especially when the legalistic barriers to that success are removed. In this context, Sowell likens the case of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire to the Jews in Germany and the Habsburg Empire; both were prominent minorities that tended to be better off on average than the majority especially in urban areas. Maybe not so much in the hinterlands, however, as there was widespread poverty and subsistence agriculture among those populations in the Armenian Highlands and Galicia respectively -- we have to intellectually recognize that difference. Perhaps Sowell's argument is somewhat deterministic (some minority groups have cultural attributes which make them more successful, and therefore become more successful than the average population), but it is an interesting dimension.

Nationalism needs an enemy to gain support and to survive.

If people were using induction, as they should, they'd realize that Armenians were largely left intact in places they actually had commercial power and that means the idea of enmity due to commercial power has little value. They would drop that argument, or even better, acknowledge its absurdity. Unfortunately, people are more interested in deduction. They accept the genocide allegations and try to create a story that makes sense in support. Along the way they ignore a lot of the discrepancies and falsehoods.

You admit then that there were atrocities committed against the Armenians, and atrocities committed on such a large enough scale to have implicated more than 1,000 people.

The removal and attacks directed towards the Armenian people were committed on a mass scale and motivated by a fear and loathing towards a specific group because of their ethnic characteristics. That is genocide.

This part alone exposes the failure of logic in genocide allegations. The scale of atrocities alone do not prove genocide. Genocide is a strictly defined legal definition. It requires intent. You're also dangerously wondering into the territory of equating ethnic clashes with genocide. It undermines the very concept of a genocide to make it stick for the Armenian's case.

That brings us to a different topic though: how many Armenians died due to which causes? How many Armenians died because of diseases? How many of them died because of hunger? How many of them died from attacks while marching south? How many of them died in clashes with authorities? How many of them died in defending their homes from attacks from neighboring village? How many of them died while attacking a neighboring village? How many of them died while fighting under the Russians? Yet, those that support the genocide allegations talk as if every single Armenian missing after WWI was dead because they were somehow killed by the Ottoman authorities.

The argument that the Armenians were an existential threat as justifying their forced removal doesn't fly, no matter how tangible the threat might seem; the Nazis saw the Jews as an existential threat to the Reich and undertook the Final Solution to solve it, and they were rightly condemned at Nuremberg, as the Ottoman officials were rightly condemned in Constantinople in 1919/1920. Nationalists always argue that some group is going to ally with the nation's enemies, and that the threat of that group is to be neutralized, either by forced removal, mass-murder, or both.

You're once again obfuscating different ideas to argue for genocide. Taking measures against insurrection is not genocide. Ethnic cleansing is not genocide. Forced removal is not genocide. Ottomans are not the first or only in history to use forced relocation to combat problems but they are the only country to be accused of genocide for it.

Ah, the court martials of 1919/1920. They were farce in so many levels. They are often presented as Nuremberg Trial of Turks but they're quite problematic. For starters, they used the forged Talat Pasha telegrams as evidence. However, the court allowed no cross-examination or use of witnesses. No records from the court exists today. The Allies themselves thought the court was farce, literally. They were so bad that the Malta Tribunals declined to use anything from their proceedings.

What could have triggered these attacks by Armenians against Turks and Kurds? These groups had been relatively peaceful for centuries, outside of the occasional territorial dispute among these groups. If they happened after the Hamidian attacks, then the killings were done out of a reaction to what was happening to them. Were Jewish partisans in the Polish/Belarusian wilderness committing genocide against the Germans when they attacked their patrols?

Oh, suddenly we're interested in what might cause attacks? Somehow that becomes an issue when its the Armenians doing the attacking. Just like nationalism was affecting every other little group in the world at that time Armenians were not immune to it. They wanted a state for themselves. There is over 15 years between what happened with Hamidian regiments and WWI. You can not connect the two event directly and excuse all that Armenians have done. We are not just talking about Armenian groups attacking Ottoman patrols. We're talking about Armenian groups razing village after village.

Your reliance on official reports and orders is also problematic. Official reports tend to, by their nature, be self-flattering accounts of the situation at the front. They hide as much as they emphasize. Orders can be similarly deceptive, and often contain euphemisms which the recipients are supposed to understand. Think, for example, how the Germans sent dissidents and Jews into "safekeeping," or that the Soviets would execute political opponents under the orders to "liquidate" the target.

I'm not relying on only official reports. I specifically mentioned discrepancies between publications and source materials they're supposed to be based on. This kind of cherry-picking is really bad. Its actually whataboutism which is very irrelevant and problematic when a genocide charge is being discussed. Of course, what it is is a deflection from acknowledging the shortcomings of the points you raised. Let's not do that. Please.

[EmperorBatman999]

Most of this has nothing to do with the genocide allegations. All it does is to tailor a story based on a pre-chosen conclusion. I also need to point out that Armenians were not expelled from Ottoman Empire like Jews were from Spain. They were relocated within the empire.




If people were using induction, as they should, they'd realize that Armenians were largely left intact in places they actually had commercial power and that means the idea of enmity due to commercial power has little value. They would drop that argument, or even better, acknowledge its absurdity. Unfortunately, people are more interested in deduction. They accept the genocide allegations and try to create a story that makes sense in support. Along the way they ignore a lot of the discrepancies and falsehoods.

Not really, though, the Armenian leaders in Constantinople were also targeted, and this article says that is when Armenians consider the start of the events in 1915.

This part alone exposes the failure of logic in genocide allegations. The scale of atrocities alone do not prove genocide. Genocide is a strictly defined legal definition. It requires intent. You're also dangerously wondering into the territory of equating ethnic clashes with genocide. It undermines the very concept of a genocide to make it stick for the Armenian's case.

That brings us to a different topic though: how many Armenians died due to which causes? How many Armenians died because of diseases? How many of them died because of hunger? How many of them died from attacks while marching south? How many of them died in clashes with authorities? How many of them died in defending their homes from attacks from neighboring village? How many of them died while attacking a neighboring village? How many of them died while fighting under the Russians? Yet, those that support the genocide allegations talk as if every single Armenian missing after WWI was dead because they were somehow killed by the Ottoman authorities.

I am giving one reason for the intent: an official state disdain for the Armenian people. The origins for that disdain are manifold, but the heart of it is Turkish nationalism.

If the Ottomans had not forced the Armenians to march, most of those deaths wouldn't have happened. Genocide is more than just being shot by bullets or gassed; it is the entire ordeal of forced hardship and suffering, motivated by ethnic, cultural, or religious hatred. Their deaths happened as a consequence of Ottoman actions. The Ottomans were not simply relocating the Armenians; they were forcing them to move into the Syrian desert, a place that is desolate and uninhabitable.

You're once again obfuscating different ideas to argue for genocide. Taking measures against insurrection is not genocide. Ethnic cleansing is not genocide. Forced removal is not genocide. Ottomans are not the first or only in history to use forced relocation to combat problems but they are the only country to be accused of genocide for it.

Ethnic cleansing is exactly genocide. Forced removal is a process of genocide.

The horrors of the Holocaust go beyond the killing squads and gas chambers; they entail the Nuremberg Laws stripping Jews of all personal rights, Kristallnacht, the forced removal of all the Jews of Vienna, the forced removal of all Jews in Germany and western Poland and Czechoslovakia to live in squalorous ghettos "to the east," the mass-enslavement to work in war factories, and the final death marches at the end of the war.

Ah, the court martials of 1919/1920. They were farce in so many levels. They are often presented as Nuremberg Trial of Turks but they're quite problematic. For starters, they used the forged Talat Pasha telegrams as evidence. However, the court allowed no cross-examination or use of witnesses. No records from the court exists today. The Allies themselves thought the court was farce, literally. They were so bad that the Malta Tribunals declined to use anything from their proceedings.

Oh, suddenly we're interested in what might cause attacks? Somehow that becomes an issue when its the Armenians doing the attacking. Just like nationalism was affecting every other little group in the world at that time Armenians were not immune to it. They wanted a state for themselves. There is over 15 years between what happened with Hamidian regiments and WWI. You can not connect the two event directly and excuse all that Armenians have done. We are not just talking about Armenian groups attacking Ottoman patrols. We're talking about Armenian groups razing village after village.

The Hamidian attacks opened up the ethnic question. Why would the Sultan suddenly send his horsemen to pillage Armenian towns? What was the status quo prior to the attacks? Were nationalist feelings among the Armenians that much of a threat to the state that the Armenian people, who had lived under the Ottomans for five hundred years, had to die? The Hamidian Massacres need to be included in the discussion as the opening salvo in an ethnic purge of the Armenians and how Ottoman officials came to no longer see Armenians as being part of the Ottoman/Turkish national picture.

Of course Armenian nationalism was a thing, and of course it was likely goaded by Russia and the other European powers, but they were in a position of powerlessness compared to the Ottoman state they were contesting.

Again, in World War 2: when Reinhard Heydrich governed the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, he was assassinated by Czech partisans. In response, the Germans slaughtered the entire village of Lidice as a reprisal. The Lidicians had no part in the killing of Heydrich, and the participants in the massacre were rightly punished for it after the war. Because some Armenians joined the Russians or joined partisan bands doesn't justify the forced removal of the entire Armenian nation from its cultural heartland to the desert to die.

I'm not relying on only official reports. I specifically mentioned discrepancies between publications and source materials they're supposed to be based on. This kind of cherry-picking is really bad. Its actually whataboutism which is very irrelevant and problematic when a genocide charge is being discussed. Of course, what it is is a deflection from acknowledging the shortcomings of the points you raised. Let's not do that. Please.

You repeatedly cite the Tehcir Law and its specific terminology, and you have made repeated references to different orders, laws, and directives in your previous posts. These are perspectives which are on the table for this debate, and they should rightly be questioned for their accuracy and sincerity.

[PointOfViewGun]

Not really, though, the Armenian leaders in Constantinople were also targeted, and this article says that is when Armenians consider the start of the events in 1915.

As I said, Armenians of western provinces were largely left intact. Those individuals, numbering at few hundreds, were the exception among a community of Armenians in the western territories numbering hundreds of thousands strong. Armenians with alleged ties to Hunchak and Dashnak parties were arrested on 24th of April, 2015. The fact that many of them survived is yet an other evidence that there was no genocide. While some managed to flee, many were let go. Heck, even Aram Andonian, who was the creater of the Talat Pasha telegrams forgery, was one many of those that survived. He died in 1951 in Paris.

I am giving one reason for the intent: an official state disdain for the Armenian people. The origins for that disdain are manifold, but the heart of it is Turkish nationalism.

If the Ottomans had not forced the Armenians to march, most of those deaths wouldn't have happened. Genocide is more than just being shot by bullets or gassed; it is the entire ordeal of forced hardship and suffering, motivated by ethnic, cultural, or religious hatred. Their deaths happened as a consequence of Ottoman actions. The Ottomans were not simply relocating the Armenians; they were forcing them to move into the Syrian desert, a place that is desolate and uninhabitable.

Not relocating the Armenians would not eliminate famine, diseases, ethnic clashes or WWI. It is likely that more Armenians, along with more Turks and Kurds, would die. The local populace would be left to their own devices and continue killing each other. Under Russian occupation Armenians would get a better opportunity to cleanse eastern Anatolia from anyone that's a Muslim to create their own state. We'd be left with at least as many Armenians and many many more Turks and Kurds dead. I have no faith that anyone here would spend a single post on arguing that Armenians committed genocide against Turks or Kurds though.

It is an outright lie that Ottomans were moving Armenians to the desert. It's a lazy lie at that. They were being moved to towns along the Euphrates. Arabs have been inhabiting those places for centuries. Aleppo region alone was already housing up to a million people. Beirut region was in a similar situation. The method was to keep the percentage of Armenians at 10% of the local Muslim population and Armenians were sent along the Euphrates based on this ratio.

Ethnic cleansing is exactly genocide. Forced removal is a process of genocide.

The horrors of the Holocaust go beyond the killing squads and gas chambers; they entail the Nuremberg Laws stripping Jews of all personal rights, Kristallnacht, the forced removal of all the Jews of Vienna, the forced removal of all Jews in Germany and western Poland and Czechoslovakia to live in squalorous ghettos "to the east," the mass-enslavement to work in war factories, and the final death marches at the end of the war.

No. Absolutely not. Ethnic cleansing or forced removal is not genocide. There is no point in discussion if you can not first acknowledge genocide for what it is and what it is not. With such standards there is really no point.

The Hamidian attacks opened up the ethnic question. Why would the Sultan suddenly send his horsemen to pillage Armenian towns? What was the status quo prior to the attacks? Were nationalist feelings among the Armenians that much of a threat to the state that the Armenian people, who had lived under the Ottomans for five hundred years, had to die? The Hamidian Massacres need to be included in the discussion as the opening salvo in an ethnic purge of the Armenians and how Ottoman officials came to no longer see Armenians as being part of the Ottoman/Turkish national picture.

Of course Armenian nationalism was a thing, and of course it was likely goaded by Russia and the other European powers, but they were in a position of powerlessness compared to the Ottoman state they were contesting.

Again, in World War 2: when Reinhard Heydrich governed the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, he was assassinated by Czech partisans. In response, the Germans slaughtered the entire village of Lidice as a reprisal. The Lidicians had no part in the killing of Heydrich, and the participants in the massacre were rightly punished for it after the war. Because some Armenians joined the Russians or joined partisan bands doesn't justify the forced removal of the entire Armenian nation from its cultural heartland to the desert to die.

The Hamidian regiments in this context only serves as your jump point to deflect from Armenian link to Russians. You're merely trying to open up a largely irrelevant topic to what happened during WWI to dilute the discussion. So, I will at no point go into details of that.

Armenians were hoping that inner fighting would help invite Russians into Armenian territory. This is something admitted by the Armenians themselves with many high level Armenian leaders providing criticism over after WWI as they realized that Russia was not really interested in the well-being of Armenians. So, Armenians were not powerless against the Ottoman Empire. The "Armenian Question" was first introduced in Congress of Berlin in 1876 and that compelled European states to start pressuring the empire on behalf of the Armenians. This time, with the arrival of WWI and Ottoman empire fighting multiple major powers on different fronts they seized the opportunity to carve a state of their own.

You repeatedly cite the Tehcir Law and its specific terminology, and you have made repeated references to different orders, laws, and directives in your previous posts. These are perspectives which are on the table for this debate, and they should rightly be questioned for their accuracy and sincerity.

Lets not forget that you made an issue of this when I pointed out how untrustworthy Wegner's testimony was based on his own notes. You didn't raise it when I actually referred to Tehcir Law or any other official document.

[EmperorBatman999]

As I said, Armenians of western provinces were largely left intact. Those individuals, numbering at few hundreds, were the exception among a community of Armenians in the western territories numbering hundreds of thousands strong. Armenians with alleged ties to Hunchak and Dashnak parties were arrested on 24th of April, 2015. The fact that many of them survived is yet an other evidence that there was no genocide. While some managed to flee, many were let go. Heck, even Aram Andonian, who was the creater of the Talat Pasha telegrams forgery, was one many of those that survived. He died in 1951 in Paris.

Survivability is not a metric for genocide. The American policy against the indigenous peoples of North America has increasingly been considered a genocide, but the goal was never to kill all the natives, but rather to "civilize" them. How that was executed was through relocations to areas that even white settlers found undesirable.

According to the historian Timothy Snyder, a historian who knows more about mass human suffering than pretty much anyone else today, the Nazis had been inspired by the American idea of "Manifest Destiny," and executed the Holocaust based on how the Americans suppressed and relocated the indigenous peoples. So, what the US did was likely also a genocide, and it fits the standard compared to both the Holocaust and the Armenian plight.

Not relocating the Armenians would not eliminate famine, diseases, ethnic clashes or WWI. It is likely that more Armenians, along with more Turks and Kurds, would die. The local populace would be left to their own devices and continue killing each other. Under Russian occupation Armenians would get a better opportunity to cleanse eastern Anatolia from anyone that's a Muslim to create their own state. We'd be left with at least as many Armenians and many many more Turks and Kurds dead. I have no faith that anyone here would spend a single post on arguing that Armenians committed genocide against Turks or Kurds though.

Again, we're touching into counterfactuals. Had the Armenians won and got their own state, as President Wilson had proposed, we later would probably examine what the Armenians had done and condemn them for it, wishing for a more equanimous world.

Recent historical scholarship, such as John Connelly's From Peoples Into Nations, has focused a harsh lens on post-World War I states and how they treated ethnic minorities. Connelly goes so far as to say that such countries became "miniature Habsburg empires," with the newly dominant majority lording power over the minority groups, such as Czechs domineering over Germans (see Tara Zara's Kidnapped Children), as well as Slovaks. Now, there was no ethnic cleansing in Czechoslovakia (the Germans and Slovaks were left as they were, but weren't given a share of power or language rights), so they aren't blamed for a genocide, but they are accused of pressuring minorities, breaking with Wilson's idealism that the post-Great War nation-states would be perfect democracies. Interwar Poland has similarly been accused of very strong anti-Semitism, as well as having a clear bias against Ukrainian and Lithuanian minorities.

So if Armenia joined the 1919 Cohort of nations, it would eventually be blamed for killing off its non-Armenian population. But that didn't happen, and instead the Ottomans retained control of the territory and 1.5 million Armenians were lost, so the Ottomans remain on the tribunal stand for killing those people.

It is an outright lie that Ottomans were moving Armenians to the desert. It's a lazy lie at that. They were being moved to towns along the Euphrates. Arabs have been inhabiting those places for centuries. Aleppo region alone was already housing up to a million people. Beirut region was in a similar situation. The method was to keep the percentage of Armenians at 10% of the local Muslim population and Armenians were sent along the Euphrates based on this ratio.

That still doesn't excuse the fact that the Armenians were made to endure the harsh desert on the way to the relocation zones, and that they were forcibly pulled away from their ancient homeland to achieve the political goal of neutralizing a threat to the Islamic Turkish nation. The Armenians were singled out for his ordeal, and were made to suffer for their cultural affiliation by being sent to an unrecognizable place far from home, while also being shot, killed, and violated along the way.

No. Absolutely not. Ethnic cleansing or forced removal is not genocide. There is no point in discussion if you can not first acknowledge genocide for what it is and what it is not. With such standards there is really no point.

Removing a people is an act of ethnic hate, and that is the basis of every genocide that has ever happened. We know amply well that the forced removal of Armenians caused a massive loss of life and a massive degree of trauma among the survivors, and that trauma, combined with the motivation (a disdain and distrust of the Armenians) puts it in genocide territory.

The Hamidian regiments in this context only serves as your jump point to deflect from Armenian link to Russians. You're merely trying to open up a largely irrelevant topic to what happened during WWI to dilute the discussion. So, I will at no point go into details of that.

Armenians were hoping that inner fighting would help invite Russians into Armenian territory. This is something admitted by the Armenians themselves with many high level Armenian leaders providing criticism over after WWI as they realized that Russia was not really interested in the well-being of Armenians. So, Armenians were not powerless against the Ottoman Empire. The "Armenian Question" was first introduced in Congress of Berlin in 1876 and that compelled European states to start pressuring the empire on behalf of the Armenians. This time, with the arrival of WWI and Ottoman empire fighting multiple major powers on different fronts they seized the opportunity to carve a state of their own.

The Hamidian incidents are part of the larger story, and neither you nor I get to decide where the story starts. The massacres were the first major state-sponsored transgression against the Armenians, and they should be considered as part of the larger historiography of the event.

I already showed that a notable percentage of the Armenian population showed imperial loyalty anyway, to a degree that was roughly comparable to Turks. The hothead revolutionaries still didn't have mass support for their nationalist project, especially among the rural population. It was an overblown anxiety and hatred for the Armenians among the Ottoman leadership that motivated them to enact the removals, thus bringing about the cycle of hate and suffering which followed.

Lets not forget that you made an issue of this when I pointed out how untrustworthy Wegner's testimony was based on his own notes. You didn't raise it when I actually referred to Tehcir Law or any other official document.

The timing of when I chose to confront your sources doesn't matter. Only the factual validity of the sources matter. Maybe Wegner isn't great, but neither is the Tehcir Law or the other orders you cite.

[PointOfViewGun]

Survivability is not a metric for genocide. The American policy against the indigenous peoples of North America has increasingly been considered a genocide, but the goal was never to kill all the natives, but rather to "civilize" them. How that was executed was through relocations to areas that even white settlers found undesirable.

According to the historian Timothy Snyder, a historian who knows more about mass human suffering than pretty much anyone else today, the Nazis had been inspired by the American idea of "Manifest Destiny," and executed the Holocaust based on how the Americans suppressed and relocated the indigenous peoples. So, what the US did was likely also a genocide, and it fits the standard compared to both the Holocaust and the Armenian plight.

Survivability is a metric if it was intentional. I was not talking about Armenians surviving because of their own devices but because of government intentions. Intent is what determines a genocide. You need it.

Again, we're touching into counterfactuals. Had the Armenians won and got their own state, as President Wilson had proposed, we later would probably examine what the Armenians had done and condemn them for it, wishing for a more equanimous world.

Recent historical scholarship, such as John Connelly's From Peoples Into Nations, has focused a harsh lens on post-World War I states and how they treated ethnic minorities. Connelly goes so far as to say that such countries became "miniature Habsburg empires," with the newly dominant majority lording power over the minority groups, such as Czechs domineering over Germans (see Tara Zara's Kidnapped Children), as well as Slovaks. Now, there was no ethnic cleansing in Czechoslovakia (the Germans and Slovaks were left as they were, but weren't given a share of power or language rights), so they aren't blamed for a genocide, but they are accused of pressuring minorities, breaking with Wilson's idealism that the post-Great War nation-states would be perfect democracies. Interwar Poland has similarly been accused of very strong anti-Semitism, as well as having a clear bias against Ukrainian and Lithuanian minorities.

So if Armenia joined the 1919 Cohort of nations, it would eventually be blamed for killing off its non-Armenian population. But that didn't happen, and instead the Ottomans retained control of the territory and 1.5 million Armenians were lost, so the Ottomans remain on the tribunal stand for killing those people.

Armenians are already guilty of killing hundreds of thousands of Turks and Kurds in eastern Ottoman provinces to carve themselves a state. You have shown disinterest for that already.

1.5 million Armenian could not have been dead. Its an impossibility as we know at least 1.2 million Armenians from pre-WWI Ottoman territories were alive by 1922 and pre-WWI Ottoman Armenian population was lower than 2 millions. The 1.5 million is a number used to sensationalize this issue.

That still doesn't excuse the fact that the Armenians were made to endure the harsh desert on the way to the relocation zones, and that they were forcibly pulled away from their ancient homeland to achieve the political goal of neutralizing a threat to the Islamic Turkish nation. The Armenians were singled out for his ordeal, and were made to suffer for their cultural affiliation by being sent to an unrecognizable place far from home, while also being shot, killed, and violated along the way.

Again, Armenians were not made to march into the desert. They marched through regular trade or travel routes, hence, usually along the Euphrates river. The image of Armenians marching into the endless desert is false.

Removing a people is an act of ethnic hate, and that is the basis of every genocide that has ever happened. We know amply well that the forced removal of Armenians caused a massive loss of life and a massive degree of trauma among the survivors, and that trauma, combined with the motivation (a disdain and distrust of the Armenians) puts it in genocide territory.

Not really. You are trying really hard to obfuscate different concepts to create a defensible position.

The Hamidian incidents are part of the larger story, and neither you nor I get to decide where the story starts. The massacres were the first major state-sponsored transgression against the Armenians, and they should be considered as part of the larger historiography of the event.

I already showed that a notable percentage of the Armenian population showed imperial loyalty anyway, to a degree that was roughly comparable to Turks. The hothead revolutionaries still didn't have mass support for their nationalist project, especially among the rural population. It was an overblown anxiety and hatred for the Armenians among the Ottoman leadership that motivated them to enact the removals, thus bringing about the cycle of hate and suffering which followed.

The Hamidian regiments has no value in deciding whether the Ottoman government intended to kill off Armenians in mass in WWI. Simple as that.

Your explanation on Armenian loyalty doesn't translate well into reality of what we saw in the eastern provinces. By the time relocation was ordered and started Armenian involvement with the Russians and their efforts to create an Armenian state was a reality. You can call their activities "overblown anxiety and hatred" all you want.

The timing of when I chose to confront your sources doesn't matter. Only the factual validity of the sources matter. Maybe Wegner isn't great, but neither is the Tehcir Law or the other orders you cite.

It very much matters. You're trying to obfuscate different points taken out of context to cling to your pre-conceived conclusion. We both know that tactic. It's futile. Your point about official reports has no value as they're never used at face value or used as evidence points. You merely suddenly wanted to address that in a vacuum without addressing the context they are used to avoid acknowledging that an important pillar of genocide allegations is deemed untrustworthy.

[Drtad]

Armenians with alleged ties to Hunchak and Dashnak parties were arrested on 24th of April, 2015.

A large number of Armenian politicians in the Ottoman Empire were pro-Ottoman during WWI, and even thought to try and organize an Armenian insurrection in Eastern Armenia against the Russians. Many of the politicians who were the closest allies of the Ottomans (Aknuni, etc.) were killed most brutally, in addition to many intellectuals who were not politicians (Daniel Varoujan, etc.).

This Turkish scholar has other works on the topic of the policies of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaks) in addition to this short write-up:
https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-onlin...federation_arf

[PointOfViewGun]

A large number of Armenian politicians in the Ottoman Empire were pro-Ottoman during WWI, and even thought to try and organize an Armenian insurrection in Eastern Armenia against the Russians. Many of the politicians who were the closest allies of the Ottomans (Aknuni, etc.) were killed most brutally, in addition to many intellectuals who were not politicians (Daniel Varoujan, etc.).

This Turkish scholar has other works on the topic of the policies of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaks) in addition to this short write-up:
https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-onlin...federation_arf

Many sure were supportive of the Ottomans, many others were not. It's a matter of fact that Dashnak and Hunchak parties organized insurrection against Ottomans within eastern Ottoman provinces, not Russians during WWI.

From Edward J. Erickson's The Armenian Relocations and Ottoman National Security: Military Necessity or Excuse for Genocide?:

The uprising in the city of Van in april 1015 was orchestrated by the Dashnaks in conjunction with a simultaneous offensive by the Russian army, which itself included Armenian regiments of expatriate Ottoman Armenian citizens. It was carefully planned and the small Ottoman force in the area quickly lost control of the city and then failed to prevent the relief of Armenians by the advancing Russian army. The Ottoman high command immediately viewed the loss of the city in this manner (internal revolt supported by well-coordinated Russian military offensives) as a template for future enemy operations. Moreover, in the Alexandretta and Dortyol region, the Ottomans expected an amphibious invasion by the British and French link up with and support the heavily armed Armenian committees in that area as well. Today there is no doubt that the Allies encouraged and supported the Armenian committees to revolt against the empire in the spring of 1915 and the Ottomans believed that what happened in Van was about to be repeated elsewhere.

There is no doubt that not every single one of those arrested in the capital were guilty of anything. Many were let go with intervention of influential people early on. Many were court martialed and hanged or prisoned or exiled. Many fled along the route. Many survived throughout the war under Ottoman control. There are many tragedies there. However, the fate of many are merely dependent on hearsay. The lack of proper or insufficient record is abused to sensationalize very single death beyond its reality similar to how Wegner talked about Armenian women eating their new born babies.