Armenian Genocide - recognition and denialism, the politics

[PointOfViewGun]

We should also not forget that how politics revolving around Armenian genocide allegations created ASALA that targeted Turks in Europe and went as far as bombing Turkish check out line at Paris Orly airport, killing 8 and injuring 55 people, while its members received heroes welcome in Armenia.

So Turkey is not denying massacres of Armenians took place and it was deliberate. So what is Turkey objecting to?
* The number of Armenians killed? That it was only 500,000 and not 1 mullion? What number would you admit were killed?
* Whether it was premeditated or not. Surely, you don't think that all those Armenians were killed by accident?
You say no one is denying anything? I don't see sny evidence that Turkey has acknowledge the massacres took place, can you provide evidence that it has acknowledged it?

You're obfuscating the entire issue. First of all, making excuses against an action is completely different from rejection of allegations of an action. Genocide is a very specific action; killing members of a particular group with the intent to destroy said group. The charge here is that Ottomans planned and orchestrated a campaign of massacres to kill 1.5 million Armenians within Ottoman Empire. Rejecting genocide allegations doesn't excuse genocide. It doesn't mean it is argued that no Armenian is killed. Many parts of that allegation is rejected; from number of Armenians that perished during WWI to whether the Ottoman government intended to kill of Armenians.

Here are some passages from the Turkish foreign ministry website on the issue from the perspective of what the state view accepts:

The Events of 1915 and the Turkish-Armenian Controversy over History: An Overview

The final years of the Ottoman Empire was a tragic period for the people that made up the Empire. Turks, Armenians, and many others suffered immensely. This period needs to be understood in its entirety and the memory of so many lives lost has to be properly respected. Such an exercise requires a reliable factual basis, an open approach, and empathy.

Turkey does not deny the suffering of Armenians, including the loss of many innocent lives, during the First World War.

Ottoman Government took a number of measures for safe transfer during the relocation. However, under war-time conditions exacerbated by internal strife, local groups seeking revenge, banditry, famine, epidemics, and a failing state apparatus (including unruly officials who were court-martialed and sentenced to capital punishment by the Ottoman Government in 1916, much before the end of the War) all combined to produce what became a tragedy.

The Armenian Allegation of Genocide: The issue and the facts

The totality of evidence thus far uncovered by historians tells a grim story of serious inter-communal conflict, perpetrated by both Christian and Muslim irregular forces, complicated by disease, famine, and many other of war’s privations. The evidence does not, however, describe genocide.

Where Ottoman control was weakest Armenian relocatees suffered most. The stories of the time give many examples of columns of hundreds of Armenians guarded by as few as two Ottoman gendarmes. When local Muslims attacked the columns, Armenians were robbed and killed. It must be remembered that these Muslims had themselves suffered greatly at the hands of Armenians and Russians. In the words of U.S. Ambassador Mark Bristol, "While the Dashnaks [Armenian revolutionaries] were in power they did everything in the world to keep the pot boiling by attacking Kurds, Turks and Tartars; [and] by committing outrages against the Moslems …."

Figures reporting the total pre-World War I Armenian population vary widely, with Armenian sources claiming far more than others. British, French and Ottoman sources give figures of 1.05-1.50 million. Only certain Armenian sources claim a pre-war population larger than 1.5 million. Comparing these to post-war figures yields a rough estimate of losses. Historian and demographer, Dr. Justin McCarthy of the University of Louisville, calculates the actual losses as slightly less than 600,000. This figure agrees with those provided by British historian Arnold Toynbee, by most early editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and approximates the number given by Monseigneur Touchet, a French missionary, who informed the Oeuvre d'Orient in February 1916 that the number of dead is thought to be 500,000. Boghos Nubar, head of the Armenian delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1920, noted the large numbers who survived the war. He declared that after the war 280,000 Armenians remained in the Anatolian portion of the occupied Ottoman Empire while 700,000 Armenians had emigrated to other countries.

It has never been an official position that Armenian did not suffer in any way. That thought is confined to the most ultra-nationalist circles. Whats contested is how those deaths occurred. Arguing that people died because of ethnic clashes, famine, diseases and wartime conditions doesn't excuse genocide or ignore suffering of any group. It merely puts that suffering in proper context.

[alhoon]

We should also not forget that how politics revolving around Armenian genocide allegations created ASALA that targeted Turks in Europe and went as far as bombing Turkish check out line at Paris Orly airport, killing 8 and injuring 55 people, while its members received heroes welcome in Armenia.

I was not aware of that, nor of what ASALA is. They sound buttholes to be honest. I am 100% sure that the 8 people killed and the 55 injured had nothing to do with the death of Armenians in the early 20th century.

However... the above needs a bit more context. What do you mean? That recognition of the genocide leads to crazy people bombing random people in cities 2500-3000 km away from where the massacres happen? That there is so much hate concentrated around the issue that radicalizes people? Something else?

If you mean the 2nd, then I would say that this can't be helped. Some people are crazy and violent and heated issues would lead them to murder.

First of all, making excuses against an action is completely different from rejection of allegations of an action. Genocide is a very specific action; killing members of a particular group with the intent to destroy said group. The charge here is that Ottomans planned and orchestrated a campaign of massacres to kill 1.5 million Armenians within Ottoman Empire. Rejecting genocide allegations doesn't excuse genocide. It doesn't mean it is argued that no Armenian is killed. Many parts of that allegation is rejected; from number of Armenians that perished during WWI to whether the Ottoman government intended to kill of Armenians.

Here are some passages from the Turkish foreign ministry website on the issue from the perspective of what the state view accepts:

The Events of 1915 and the Turkish-Armenian Controversy over History: An Overview




[...]

It has never been an official position that Armenian did not suffer in any way. That thought is confined to the most ultra-nationalist circles. Whats contested is how those deaths occurred. Arguing that people died because of ethnic clashes, famine, diseases and wartime conditions doesn't excuse genocide or ignore suffering of any group. It merely puts that suffering in proper context.

According to the definition of genocide you gave in this post which IIRC is the official definition of genocide...
what the Turkish ministry describes is genocide. That's what we're trying to tell you.

It doesn't matter if not all Turkish officials were on board. A great number of them were. A lot of irregulars were targeting Armenians (genocide doesn't have to be state-sanctioned. The Hutus that butchered the Tutsis were armed militias. Moderate Hutu leaders were killed in the opening phases of the genocide by the militias. Genocide includes forceful relocation of population, thus the Assyrian act to death-march the Jews away from Palestine in antiquity was genocide (first recorded genocide).

How would you want us to call the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Armenians, some by famine, some by government officials of a weakened central government, some my militias, some by military commanders afraid that they will be stabbed in the back while Russians invade?

Read your own source: 500K deaths, 700K exiles! Just 300K people out of 1.5M people remained. And the "unruly officials who were court-martialed in 1916" while the events continued till 1923, and the actions of the Turkish military and the recorded actions of at least SOME gendarmes that raped Armenian women or killed the men during the death marches is not disputed even by your source (which I understand is the ministry of foreign affairs).
That is genocide.
You simply don't call it Genocide but use different, longer words to say what genocide actually means.

If you have a different definition of genocide, we can discuss it, but even your ministry gives an account that could be surmised as "Genocide" instead of a paragraph beating around the bush.


_______________
Speaking of acts of Genocide: The firebombing of Dresden or the forced relocations of Germans from Prussia were acts of genocide.
For Dresden it is not as clear-cut as there was a strategic target there ("Curb their morale and willingness to keep the war going") abominable as it was to burn a whole city.

I am not sure if there was a concentrated act by the Americans to wipe out the Japanese from some of the islands near Japan where the Empire of Japan had set roots for centuries before WW2... or if there WERE such islands. But if there were such islands where Japanese were killed and expelled because they happened to be Japanese in the wrong place, that's an act of (tiny because of numbers) genocide.

[Kritias]

Some observations:

1. I think we can all agree on the fact that genocide recognition as politics is a bludgeoning tool used to internationally discredit, denounce or otherwise inconvenience a government. The recent recognition of the Armenian genocide by the US is a prime example of how the politics of recognition are used to exert pressures (or even at times fabricate reasons for war/intervention/sanctions) on a state which is suddenly perceived as ‘hostile’ by the recognizer. The fact that it took the US a hundred and so years to recognize something that the Armenian community has been pushing for ages to be seen as the genocide of their people should inform us that the only reason it happened now is because the US are at odds with the Turkish government.

2. Viewed in this light, the recognition of the Armenian Genocide must be understood within a context of a nation shifting in and out of supra-national alliances like NATO. The loosening and tightening of what constitutes a genocide according to the case in question might also be useful to be seen under the context of a political tool instead of its clear historical reality.

3. Unless forced to accept it like Germany, I can’t think of another example of a state that has by itself recognized conducting a genocide (please, correct me if I’m wrong here). That doesn’t mean that a) genocides did/are not happen(ing) elsewhere, b) that the powers that be won’t cook up a genocide to exert pressures on hostile governments, and c) that states will fail to recognize/conceal a genocide if the balance of power brings the perpetrator in the ‘good guys’ team.

4. Happy ninth birthday to all those who believe that a state, and even worse a superpower or an empire, will baulk at the idea of using oppression and other, more sinister means like conducting mass murder and genocide to subdue the ‘dangerous’ or separatist populations. Examples of this happening surpass the East/West divide, no matter how some would have us believe otherwise. Terror is a useful tool often used by governments to subdue unwilling populations or classes.

5. Happy tenth birthday to those who believe that human life was gifted with the face value it has today prior to 1950s-1970s. With the establishment of international organizations who monitor and try and unearth genocides/ethnic cleansings etc, and the shift to a more humanistic understanding, popular anti-war sentiments etc we gradually try to move away from our collective barbarism. Before that, human life was seen more like a resource to be used, abused and discarded according to the state’s needs.

6. Popular culture has ingrained in us the idea of a clear-cut divide between the genocidal state and its innocent victims. This idea stems primarily through depicting the Holocaust as the primary example of a genocide where such a divide is very, very clear. However, in the broader sense of history such divides are not always clear cut; it is possible for a nation to simultaneously be both the victim of a genocide and perpetrator of other, lesser aggressions towards the perpetrator, like terrorism for example. This is where the controversy kicks in; the state conducting the genocide will often point towards lesser crimes committed (or allegedly committed) by the targeted population to justify its use of terror against them; and governments involved in similar tactics (either in the present or past) will usually be very cautious to recognize the event as a genocide for their own selfish reasons.

7. The fact that other genocides have happened and/or have been concealed by public acknowledgement does not negate the harrowing reality that most modern states have at one point in their history conducted mass murder campaigns/genocide somewhere to control populations living under their rule. It’s still morally reprehensible, even if everybody is doing it. Any further discussion on the scale of atrocities is just a number’s game to see who comes out on top with the least blood on their hands. Sometimes, genocide denialism and genocide recognition is serving other, more nefarious needs as to whitewash other genocides by comparison. On the whole, genocide recognition politics should be taken with a grain of salt; they were meant to serve contemporary political goals, not to bring justice to the killed populations.

8. Deportations, the mass uprooting of peoples from their land, has been the bread and butter of empires and states for centuries and it still happens to this day. The Treaty of Lausanne for example stipulated among other things for population exchanges between Greece and Turkey – which meant mass deportations from both countries, leading to an unknown number of dead during the process. These deportations were sanctioned by all signatory parties: the British, French, Italians, Japanese, Romanians, Yugoslavs, Greeks, and Turks.

9. The Ottoman Empire did not have a concept of individual responsibility. The blame for aggressive actions against them fell on the local community and its leaders, no matter how far separated these communities were from the incident. You can see this in the Greek War of Independence where the Turks hung the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, Gregory V, holding him accountable for the revolt despite him condemning the independence war. This was followed by massacres of Greek populations in Constantinople and Asia Minor, despite them not having any part in the revolt.

10. Similarly, Armenian populations in the empire were held responsible for the catastrophe of the Three Pashas in Sarikamish. According to the official story, the Armenians sided with the Russians (being promised independence) and caused the death of 60,000 Ottoman soldiers and rampaged the surrounding countryside. It seems wide-scale reprisals took place in various Ottoman cities on the beginning stages of the genocide. It also seems that the atrocities were joined by civilians, irregulars, guerilla fighters and others. The claim that the state was disintegrating because of WW1 seems a bit weak, due to the fact that the Armenian massacre started as early as 1915, and continued until 1923.

11. On May 24, 1915, the Entente powers (Britain, France & Russia) in a joint communique denounced the Ottoman empire for ‘crimes against humanity and civilization’ in regard to the Armenian genocide. The document reads that “In view of these new crimes of Ottoman Empire against humanity and civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres.” By the end of WW1, it was the US delegation that denied trying the Ottoman Empire for the Armenian genocide because a) the terms of the crimes against humanity were poorly defined, and b) because it was an intrusion in another states’ internal affairs.

12. Mass deportation of Armenian populations seems to have been widespread with people as far away from Sarikamish as Adrianople affected. Experts point to the path these deportations took, ie through the Syrian desert, to prove intention of leading as many people as possible to their deaths by exposure to the natural elements. Reports have been made where Turkish regulars or irregulars executed people outright, while others point towards bribes asked for a chance at drinking water. The list of cruelties is extensive. Similar events have been documented against POWs, for example in Doukas’ A Prisoner of War’s Story (1929). Here’s an excerpt from the book:

After days spent in fear, an officer came with forty soldiers and took charge of us. They took us out into the yard and separated us from the civilians. That's when I saw my brother. They put us in lines of four and ordered us to kneel so they could count us.The officer, who was mounted on his horse looked us over and said, 'I'll see to it that your seed is wiped out!'
Then he gave the order to march.
There must have been about two thousand men in our column.
They marched us straight to the marketplace. A Turkish mob was waiting there and like an order, fell on us. From all sides they threw tables, chairs, glasses - whatever they could lay their hands on. There were European sailors with them in the coffee houses and they were looking on for a bit of fun.

At Alhoon, if the Dresden firebombing was an act of genocide, then dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki must be acts of genocide, too, according to the same logic. Correct? Following this logic, nearly everything that has happened in world history, whether it’s the deportation of Jewish people from the Assyrians, the rape of the Sabine women, the destruction of Carthage…. (Insert here all the barbaric deeds done by our respective ancestors)… were acts of genocide. And, in a loose interpretation of the word, they most certainly were.


But genocide as a term was coined to signify something so extraordinary that we had to change international law to criminalize it. According to Douglas Irvin-Ericson prior to 1948, genocide wasn’t only not a crime – it was considered the sovereign right of the state (Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). According to Katherine Goldsmith, :

“While studying at the University of Lvov, Raphael Lemkin, a twenty-one-year-old Polish Jew, came across an article on Soghomon Tehlirian. Tehlirian was an Armenian Genocide survivor on trial for the murder of Mehmet Talaat, one of the orchestrators of the Armenian Genocide, who had at the time escaped prosecution. ‘‘Lemkin asked [his professor] why the Armenians did not have Talaat arrested for the massacre. The professor said there was no law under which he could be arrested. ‘Consider the case of a farmer, who owns a flock of chickens,’ he said. ‘He kills them and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing.’’ Finding this gap in international law intolerable, Lemkin began work on an international law proposal for this sort of crime”

Even in the Nuremberg trials, genocide had to be made into a crime by linking it with crimes against peace and war crimes. According to Hilberg’s the “Destruction of the European Jews”, the crime of genocide by itself run against the long-established right of state to dispose its citizens as it wished:

Justice Jackson, concurring in this view, pointed out in unmistakable language why there could be no other basis for jurisdiction:


It has been a general principle from time immemorial that the internal affairs of another government are not ordinarily our business; that is to say, the way Germany treats its inhabitants, or any other country treats its inhabitants, is not our affair any more than it is the affair of some other government to interpose itself in our problems. . . . We have some regrettable circumstances at times in our own country in which minorities are unfairly treated. We think that it is justifiable that we interfere or attempt to bring retribution to individuals or to states only because the concentration camps and the deportations were in pursuance of a common plan or enterprise of making an unjust war in which we became involved. We see no other basis on which we are justified in reaching the atrocities which were committed inside Germany, under German law, or even in violation of German law, by authorities of the German state.

So, there you have it. Despite the fact that the Entente denounced the Ottomans for the destruction of the Armenian population in 1915, and the fact the Ottomans did conduct a mass murder campaign against the Armenians, the treaties that brought this war into conclusion failed to recognize the crime. It wouldn’t be until the Nazi death factories that states would accept that the mass killing of people was a crime, but only in a narrow interpretation by tying the concept of genocide to a war. The retroactive interpretation of crimes as such, especially considering that the recognition comes several decades or a century later, points towards the political expedience of the action as being far more important than the condemning the action itself. Unfortunately, when we talk of genocides we mustn't forget the politics involved in such atrocities - as well as the policies of looking the other way. Alas, such is our kind (so far).

[Common Soldier]

We should also not forget that how politics revolving around Armenian genocide allegations created ASALA that targeted Turks in Europe and went as far as bombing Turkish check out line at Paris Orly airport, killing 8 and injuring 55 people, while its members received heroes welcome in Armenia.



You're obfuscating the entire issue. First of all, making excuses against an action is completely different from rejection of allegations of an action. Genocide is a very specific action; killing members of a particular group with the intent to destroy said group. The charge here is that Ottomans planned and orchestrated a campaign of massacres to kill 1.5 million Armenians within Ottoman Empire. Rejecting genocide allegations doesn't excuse genocide. It doesn't mean it is argued that no Armenian is killed. Many parts of that allegation is rejected; from number of Armenians that perished during WWI to whether the Ottoman government intended to kill of Armenians.

Here are some passages from the Turkish foreign ministry website on the issue from the perspective of what the state view accepts:

The Events of 1915 and the Turkish-Armenian Controversy over History: An Overview




The Armenian Allegation of Genocide: The issue and the facts




It has never been an official position that Armenian did not suffer in any way. That thought is confined to the most ultra-nationalist circles. Whats contested is how those deaths occurred. Arguing that people died because of ethnic clashes, famine, diseases and wartime conditions doesn't excuse genocide or ignore suffering of any group. It merely puts that suffering in proper context.

Yes you are denying it. You are denying that Turks had nothing to do with the massacres. All you are willing to acknowledge is that deaths took place.

What difference that the deaths took place where Ottoman control was weakest? They still happened, and Turks were still responsible. You complain of me obfuscating the issue, but you are the only one doing the obfuscating. I have yet to hear you or other Turks

*Widespread massacres took place

*That Turks were responsible for the massacres.

You acknowledge deaths took place. What killed these Armenians then? Martians from Mars?

As far as I can see, you and Turkey have been denying these massacres.

I can see a legitimate argument can be made they were not "genocide" as sone regard the word, that there might not have been a deliberately planned extermination, and that the numbers claimed might be high. But Turks were responsible for the deaths and so far I have not seen Turks apologize for the deaths.

Let ask a few questions

* Do you acknowledge that large number of Armenians were killed, yes or no?

* Do you acknowledge that Turks were tesponsible for those deaths, Yes or No?

If you cannot answer yes to both questions, then you are a denier. So far, I yet to see Turkey or most Turks answer yes to either questions. But you could prove me wrong, but not by evading the questions

[Nebaki]

As an Academic, I find abhorrent the actions of the Turkish government to whitewash the Armenian genocide (and Pontic and Assyrian genocides) as legitimate war action and downplay the damage it caused and how it eradicated Armenians from large parts of their ancestral lands.

The events of 1915-1923 (which I think they constitute Genocide) left hundreds of thousands of Armenians dead and they included the forceful relocation of not Just Armenians but also Greeks and Assyrians (we Greeks have been kicked out of Ionia after 5 millennia - 4 more than the Turks are there).

1. You are an Academic? I guess self-proclaimed.

2. A Guy already showed ones before how we would behave on a Thread related to a Issue of between greece-Turkey and already admitted he can´t be impartial still relates himself to having something to do with the ancient greeks?

3. Speaks about himself as Academic relates his argumentation to not a judical court, instead to some self-proclaimed wannabe Historians getting paychecked by the armenian Society which lives anywhere but not armenia and some governments of different countries which gonna even can change from today to tomorrow.

The majority of independent Historians, the UN and other international organizations and 33 countries as of 2021 (including USA, France, Brazil and Germany) have officially recognized the events that led to near eradication of the Armenians as genocide.

4. This misses a Source:

I don't know in which countries it is illegal to Deny that the events of 1915-1923 were genocide, but I do know that a Genocide denier got sentenced for denying the genocide in Switzerland in 2007.

6. It was just a Relocation which was mismanaged which is even rightful to say since you are living somewhere in Turkey or European Union. A European Court will not sentence you for something even for denying it.

7.

There is no Southern Cyprus. There's only Cyprus with occupied parts by an evil bully. But I agree that it is not coincidence that Cyprus recognized the Armenian genocide as such, after the brutal invasion in 1974.

You mean North Cyprus which is a legitimate State whoms territory of South is still under a occupation? I love how you banalize things as you like. Maybe you should open an "Academic" post about Cyprus too?

[PointOfViewGun]

I was not aware of that, nor of what ASALA is. They sound buttholes to be honest. I am 100% sure that the 8 people killed and the 55 injured had nothing to do with the death of Armenians in the early 20th century.
However... the above needs a bit more context. What do you mean? That recognition of the genocide leads to crazy people bombing random people in cities 2500-3000 km away from where the massacres happen? That there is so much hate concentrated around the issue that radicalizes people? Something else?
If you mean the 2nd, then I would say that this can't be helped. Some people are crazy and violent and heated issues would lead them to murder.

ASALA, Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, was created in 1975 to force Turkey to accept the genocide allegations and cede territory to Armenia. They conducted attacks in Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, Azerbaijan, Greece, France, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Belgium, UK, USA and Canada, primarily targeting Turkish diplomats, embassy employees and Turkish airlines flights. Two of their deadliest attacks were bombing of Ankara Esenboğa airport, killing 9 injuring 78, and bombing of Paris Orly airport, killing 8 injuring 55. With increasing Turkish counter-terrorism and Paris attack pushing the French intelligence towards a direction they didn't want, the group largely died on around 1991.

That group was a product of decades of vilification of Turks as the spawn of Satan by the Armenian diaspora. One of the attackers in Paris, Varoujan Garabedian, was released from French prison in 2001, and was deported to Armenia, with him receiving a heroes welcome, and a meeting with the prime minister. Another ASALA member, Gourgen Yanikian, who lured the Turkish consul and vice-consul in 1973 in California to a cabin with the promise of returning a painting stolen from Ottomans, emptied 9 shots on to them during lunch, finishing them with 2 more shots in their head. He is thought to be the inspiration for ASALA's creation. In 2019, his remains were moved from USA to Armenian Yerablur Pantheon in Yerevan, a military cemetery in Armenia.

In part, current genocide allegation recognition efforts are not motivated by righting the wrongs of history. It's mostly a product of further vilification of Turks. If it wasn't it would be divorced from individual random Turks, yet, it is not. Even in popular culture you're forced to portray Turks as the spawn of Satan. Russell Crowe's Water Diviner movie that followed an Australian father's pursuit of his son that didn't come back from the Gallipoli campaign was protested and boycotted because it didn't portray Turks evil enough.

According to the definition of genocide you gave in this post which IIRC is the official definition of genocide...
what the Turkish ministry describes is genocide. That's what we're trying to tell you.

It doesn't matter if not all Turkish officials were on board. A great number of them were. A lot of irregulars were targeting Armenians (genocide doesn't have to be state-sanctioned. The Hutus that butchered the Tutsis were armed militias. Moderate Hutu leaders were killed in the opening phases of the genocide by the militias. Genocide includes forceful relocation of population, thus the Assyrian act to death-march the Jews away from Palestine in antiquity was genocide (first recorded genocide).

How would you want us to call the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Armenians, some by famine, some by government officials of a weakened central government, some my militias, some by military commanders afraid that they will be stabbed in the back while Russians invade?

Read your own source: 500K deaths, 700K exiles! Just 300K people out of 1.5M people remained. And the "unruly officials who were court-martialed in 1916" while the events continued till 1923, and the actions of the Turkish military and the recorded actions of at least SOME gendarmes that raped Armenian women or killed the men during the death marches is not disputed even by your source (which I understand is the ministry of foreign affairs).
That is genocide.
You simply don't call it Genocide but use different, longer words to say what genocide actually means.

If you have a different definition of genocide, we can discuss it, but even your ministry gives an account that could be surmised as "Genocide" instead of a paragraph beating around the bush.

_______________
Speaking of acts of Genocide: The firebombing of Dresden or the forced relocations of Germans from Prussia were acts of genocide.
For Dresden it is not as clear-cut as there was a strategic target there ("Curb their morale and willingness to keep the war going") abominable as it was to burn a whole city.

I am not sure if there was a concentrated act by the Americans to wipe out the Japanese from some of the islands near Japan where the Empire of Japan had set roots for centuries before WW2... or if there WERE such islands. But if there were such islands where Japanese were killed and expelled because they happened to be Japanese in the wrong place, that's an act of (tiny because of numbers) genocide.

Vast suffering of people doesn't automatically make it a genocide. You're basically calling any suffering of a particular group regardless of intent as genocide. You wouldn't evaluate Turks suffering at the hands of Armenians and Greeks this way. Why are you doing it for Armenians? Did Germans commit genocide on Turks because some far-right nationalists targeted and killed Turks with döner shops?

9. The Ottoman Empire did not have a concept of individual responsibility. The blame for aggressive actions against them fell on the local community and its leaders, no matter how far separated these communities were from the incident. You can see this in the Greek War of Independence where the Turks hung the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, Gregory V, holding him accountable for the revolt despite him condemning the independence war. This was followed by massacres of Greek populations in Constantinople and Asia Minor, despite them not having any part in the revolt.

This implies that other communities of the time had the concept of individual responsibility. During the time of the Greek war of independence, the entire Turkic population of Morea was killed off. What were they hold accountable of?

10. Similarly, Armenian populations in the empire were held responsible for the catastrophe of the Three Pashas in Sarikamish. According to the official story, the Armenians sided with the Russians (being promised independence) and caused the death of 60,000 Ottoman soldiers and rampaged the surrounding countryside. It seems wide-scale reprisals took place in various Ottoman cities on the beginning stages of the genocide. It also seems that the atrocities were joined by civilians, irregulars, guerilla fighters and others. The claim that the state was disintegrating because of WW1 seems a bit weak, due to the fact that the Armenian massacre started as early as 1915, and continued until 1923.

This is quite inaccurate. If Armenians were held responsible for the disaster in Sarıkamış why were Armenians of Western provinces mostly left untouched? The failure in Sarıkamış falls on Enver alone as the other two commanders were not present in the front. The "official story" isn't that Armenians somehow caused. It's that the Russians sank an Ottoman cargo ship carrying winter gear for the 3rd army but Enver pasha forced the army on despite being unprepared for the conditions. Today, the battle is not remembered for any kind of Armenian treachery but for the brutal conditions the army had to march on. Groups of people perform the same march to commemorate them.

11. On May 24, 1915, the Entente powers (Britain, France & Russia) in a joint communique denounced the Ottoman empire for ‘crimes against humanity and civilization’ in regard to the Armenian genocide. The document reads that “In view of these new crimes of Ottoman Empire against humanity and civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres.” By the end of WW1, it was the US delegation that denied trying the Ottoman Empire for the Armenian genocide because a) the terms of the crimes against humanity were poorly defined, and b) because it was an intrusion in another states’ internal affairs.

This is completely false. In fact, Ottomans were tried three times. Once was by Ottomans during 1915/1916 where officers, locals and others were tried for exploiting the relocation orders. Second time was by the British during Malta tribunals where despite a search of Allied and Ottoman archives (as the capital was under Allied occupation at this point) no evidence of crimes against Armenians were found. Third time was when under Allied pressure a number of Ottoman officials were put on trial, some absentee. The courts are known to have utilized forgeries and are deemed as kangaroo courts with no proper procedure.

12. Mass deportation of Armenian populations seems to have been widespread with people as far away from Sarikamish as Adrianople affected. Experts point to the path these deportations took, ie through the Syrian desert, to prove intention of leading as many people as possible to their deaths by exposure to the natural elements. Reports have been made where Turkish regulars or irregulars executed people outright, while others point towards bribes asked for a chance at drinking water. The list of cruelties is extensive. Similar events have been documented against POWs, for example in Doukas’ A Prisoner of War’s Story (1929). Here’s an excerpt from the book:

Another falsehood. Marches were done through trade routes of the region. They were not done through desert areas but mostly along the Euphrates river. Those that could afford were allowed to board the train. Per US documents, by early 1916, its reported that about 500 thousand people reached their destinations. With hundreds of thousands more that fled to Russia, what kind of death march fails to kill even half its participants?

Yes you are denying it. You are denying that Turks had nothing to do with the massacres. All you are willing to acknowledge is that deaths took place.
What difference that the deaths took place where Ottoman control was weakest? They still happened, and Turks were still responsible. You complain of me obfuscating the issue, but you are the only one doing the obfuscating. I have yet to hear you or other Turks
*Widespread massacres took place
*That Turks were responsible for the massacres.
You acknowledge deaths took place. What killed these Armenians then? Martians from Mars?
As far as I can see, you and Turkey have been denying these massacres.
I can see a legitimate argument can be made they were not "genocide" as sone regard the word, that there might not have been a deliberately planned extermination, and that the numbers claimed might be high. But Turks were responsible for the deaths and so far I have not seen Turks apologize for the deaths.
Let ask a few questions
* Do you acknowledge that large number of Armenians were killed, yes or no?
* Do you acknowledge that Turks were tesponsible for those deaths, Yes or No?
If you cannot answer yes to both questions, then you are a denier. So far, I yet to see Turkey or most Turks answer yes to either questions. But you could prove me wrong, but not by evading the questions

I see that you were shown to be utterly wrong. Instead of acknowledging the short comings of your claims you're doubling down on them and clearly trying to avoid addressing the actual points. Your questions are already answered. How could I be avoiding those questions by providing substance to them not just from me but from the Turkish foreign ministry itself?

[Kritias]

This implies that other communities of the time had the concept of individual responsibility. During the time of the Greek war of independence, the entire Turkic population of Morea was killed off. What were they hold accountable of?

Yes, it does mean precisely that. The concept of individual responsibility is deeply tied with European libertarianism and was in use at least by the late 17oos. As for the killings of Turks in Greece during the war of independence, perhaps you'd like to read this quote of mine, from a thread earlier this year:

The similarities between the addresses of the Greek intelligentsia to the newspapers published in London during the first year of the revolution is telling as to who the intended audience was supposed to be. Writings from the local captains of the revolution on the other side, mostly written after the revolution since the captains were by large illiterate (some in Greek, others completely), include sparse references to ancient Greece in subsequent editions, are surprisingly frugal of any nationalistic sentiment and appear to have understood the struggle against the Turks on a religious basis of Christiandom versus Islam. Records of the time show that the local parishes and the clergy also understood the struggle in this way, which at the onset of the revolution led to mass scale slaughter of Turkish populations in the Greek mainland.

As you can see, I am not above admitting historical facts. As to what the Turkish population was held accountable for, you can read the thread where I go over the ideological reasons behind the war of independence.

This is quite inaccurate. If Armenians were held responsible for the disaster in Sarıkamış why were Armenians of Western provinces mostly left untouched? The failure in Sarıkamış falls on Enver alone as the other two commanders were not present in the front. The "official story" isn't that Armenians somehow caused. It's that the Russians sank an Ottoman cargo ship carrying winter gear for the 3rd army but Enver pasha forced the army on despite being unprepared for the conditions. Today, the battle is not remembered for any kind of Armenian treachery but for the brutal conditions the army had to march on. Groups of people perform the same march to commemorate them.

That may be, but historical evidence points towards the Turkish authorities and to Enver specifically blaming the Armenians for the catastrophe, and this is usually cited as the start of the animosity that led to mass scale carnage. The Armenians were blamed for siding with the Russians, and any weapons found in Armenian homes were advertised as evidence for a conspiracy against the empire. Here's some references for this: Ungor, 2016; Suny, 2015; Ackham, 2019; Kevorkian, 2011; Dundar, 2011.

This is completely false. In fact, Ottomans were tried three times. Once was by Ottomans during 1915/1916 where officers, locals and others were tried for exploiting the relocation orders. Second time was by the British during Malta tribunals where despite a search of Allied and Ottoman archives (as the capital was under Allied occupation at this point) no evidence of crimes against Armenians were found. Third time was when under Allied pressure a number of Ottoman officials were put on trial, some absentee. The courts are known to have utilized forgeries and are deemed as kangaroo courts with no proper procedure.

Not really. While it is true that Ottomans tried and eventually shot some of the responsible for the massacre, many of them led very influential political lives after the fact - like the minister for finance, Renda. In fact, the first trial period conducted by the Ottomans was considered a farce by the Allies and this lead to the process being removed by them (source: Public Record Office, Foreign Office, 371/4174/136069 in Dadrian, Vahakn, 2003, The History of the Armenian Genocide). There were not two different trials by the allies, only the relocation of the detainees to Malta because the British feared that widespread riots would lead to the rioters releasing the war criminals. Also, during the Malta trials, the Allies reached an impasse of how to prosecute the criminals for three years, where the American delegation played an important part in stalling the processes as I have described already (source: Cryer, Robert; Hakan Friman; Darryl Robinson; Elizabeth Wilmshurst, 2007, An Introduction to International Criminal Law and Procedure).

Another falsehood. Marches were done through trade routes of the region. They were not done through desert areas but mostly along the Euphrates river. Those that could afford were allowed to board the train. Per US documents, by early 1916, its reported that about 500 thousand people reached their destinations. With hundreds of thousands more that fled to Russia, what kind of death march fails to kill even half its participants?

No. There are historians who mapped the routes the Armenian relocation to their ends, and these are some of the final destinations they have reported: the Kemah Gorge (source: Kaiser 2019, first section, Kemah: the economy of a slaughterhouse), Lake Hazar (source: Kevorkian, 2014), the Firincilar plain (source: both of them, same books), the Kahta highlands (source: Kevorkian, 2014; Kaiser, 2010; Akcam, 2018), the Murat river (source: Kerkovian, 2014), other sites in the Syrian desert (source: Ungor, 2012).

I hope this clears your questions.

[alhoon]

6. It was just a Relocation which was mismanaged which is even rightful to say since you are living somewhere in Turkey or European Union. A European Court will not sentence you for something even for denying it.

Ignoring most of the useless drivel in a post that reeks of desperation, just one thing:

Forceful relocation where hundreds of thousands die on the march is an act of genocide, Nebaki. Even the Turkish Foreign ministry admits that some government and military officials were deliberately attacking Armenians. According to the Turkish Foreign Ministry, there were about 1.5M Armenians living in Turkey before the Genocide and just 300K Armenians after the genocide, with ~700K exiled and ~500K dead. It is in DSL's post.
A force relocation of a certain ethnic group that ends up with 80% of that group being eliminated from the country, 50% of the group exiled, 30% dead and just 20% remaining, is called genocide.

The least Turkey could do is stop describing genocide with long words and use the word genocide.

ASALA, Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, was created in 1975 to force Turkey to accept the genocide allegations and cede territory to Armenia. They conducted attacks in [Lots of places]. Two of their deadliest attacks were bombing of Ankara Esenboğa airport, killing 9 injuring 78, and bombing of Paris Orly airport, killing 8 injuring 55.

One of the attackers in Paris, Varoujan Garabedian, was released from French prison in 2001, and was deported to Armenia, with him receiving a heroes welcome, and a meeting with the prime minister.

Yeah, those actions are condemnable. But I am not sure you present the whole thing there. There's no way the world is cozy with such acts of terrorism.

In part, current genocide allegation recognition efforts are not motivated by righting the wrongs of history. It's mostly a product of further vilification of Turks.

That, and playing politics. Genocide recognition efforts decades after the event, were never motivated by righting the wrongs of history but politics and geopolitics. It is used as an easy way to troll Turkey. Modern Turkey. I honestly doubt the USA senate in 2019 was so deeply moved by the suffering of Armenians in 1919. It was an act of anger because of the F35 and S-300 thing.

If it wasn't it would be divorced from individual random Turks, yet, it is not. Even in popular culture you're forced to portray Turks as the spawn of Satan. Russell Crowe's Water Diviner movie that followed an Australian father's pursuit of his son that didn't come back from the Gallipoli campaign was protested and boycotted because it didn't portray Turks evil enough.

I honestly think you exaggerate, but:
Turkey could very much help divest the Turkish militias of 1919 from the Turks of 2019 by acknowledging the shameful past. Kurdish militias have participated in the attacks and they have since apologized to Armenia. Thus, you don't see people pointing the finger to Kurds for their actions of their great grandfathers because Kurds admitted those actions were wrong.

Now, on that movie, that's what I found on Wikipedia:
"Protest and Boycott the Water Diviner" which has over 16,000 fans" That's... just 16000 fans. You will find more people that boycotted slow cookers and Crock pot over how it was portrayed in a popular romance.
Furthermore, according to wikipedia it was not that the movie didn't portray the Turks of the era as "evil enough" but it was because the movie portrayed them as victims. I haven't watched the movie, so I can't comment, but at least to the tiny community of 16000 people they were portrayed as victims when they were not.

Now, do I think that those 16000 people have too much time in their hands? Yes, yes I do. I also recognize that since there have been terrorists killing people 60+ years after the events, there are certainly many many more that are fanatical about this.

Vast suffering of people doesn't automatically make it a genocide. You're basically calling any suffering of a particular group regardless of intent as genocide.

Not really, no. While I am absolutely sure that not every Turkish official, officer or militia captain in 1915-1923 was in agreement with the events, there was intent there. Not by everyone, but by many.

I don't know what happened with Germans and Turks and Doner shops, but if the Germans caused the suffering and relocation of large numbers of Turks and the German state looked the other way while many officials and officers were complicit? Yes, I would call it genocide.
As mentioned, in the Rwandan Genocide, the militias butchered the moderate Hutus too, not just the Tutsis.
In Myanmar, not everyone is on board with the Rohingya genocide. But you will see many similar things with the Armenian Genocide. Too many.
This is a military crackdown and forced relocation of an undesirable ethnic group because of the actions of militias from that group, with hundreds of thousands being kicked out from their Ancestral lands and dying on the death marches to Bangladesh.

Wouldn't you call the Rohingya genocide as genocide?

[PointOfViewGun]

Yes, it does mean precisely that. The concept of individual responsibility is deeply tied with European libertarianism and was in use at least by the late 17oos. As for the killings of Turks in Greece during the war of independence, perhaps you'd like to read this quote of mine, from a thread earlier this year:
As you can see, I am not above admitting historical facts. As to what the Turkish population was held accountable for, you can read the thread where I go over the ideological reasons behind the war of independence.

So, you agree that Greeks committed genocide against Morea Turks during their war of independence?

That may be, but historical evidence points towards the Turkish authorities and to Enver specifically blaming the Armenians for the catastrophe, and this is usually cited as the start of the animosity that led to mass scale carnage. The Armenians were blamed for siding with the Russians, and any weapons found in Armenian homes were advertised as evidence for a conspiracy against the empire. Here's some references for this: Ungor, 2016; Suny, 2015; Ackham, 2019; Kevorkian, 2011; Dundar, 2011.

For starters, there is no such historical evidence other than a few statements mentioned in some memoir books. This is easily explained by the discrepancy between sources that make those "blame" claims and the actual personal memoirs they're based on. For example, US ambassador portrays Talat Pasha as "bloodthirsty and ferocious" in his published book while his personal notes and letters to the state department notes how he had cordial and intimate relationship with Talat and Enver who expressed him their desire to protect Armenians that are being relocated. Many military orders passed down to local commanders to allocate additional resources to well-being of deportees support that notion. That's one example. Hence, this battle is distorted as if it was suggested as the sole reason for Ottoman action against Armenians.

It wasn't. It's true that Armenians played a role during that battle. Garegin Pasdermadjian, a high-ranking member of ARF, himself boasts of how they cut off communications of the 3rd army to help the Russians. The weapons that were found scattered through out eastern Anatolia was a testament to the existence of Armenian gangs that were known to be active behind front lines to hurt the Ottoman forces. Its a well-established fact that Armenian groups did conspire against the Ottomans to help Russians in the hopes that they'd get their own state. The trick here is that in order to ignore or dismiss widespread Armenian activity people prefer to focus on individual cases like the Sarıkamış battle. They prefer to ignore the Van rebellion in April 1915 that preceded the relocation orders.

Not really. While it is true that Ottomans tried and eventually shot some of the responsible for the massacre, many of them led very influential political lives after the fact - like the minister for finance, Renda. In fact, the first trial period conducted by the Ottomans was considered a farce by the Allies and this lead to the process being removed by them (source: Public Record Office, Foreign Office, 371/4174/136069 in Dadrian, Vahakn, 2003, The History of the Armenian Genocide). There were not two different trials by the allies, only the relocation of the detainees to Malta because the British feared that widespread riots would lead to the rioters releasing the war criminals. Also, during the Malta trials, the Allies reached an impasse of how to prosecute the criminals for three years, where the American delegation played an important part in stalling the processes as I have described already (source: Cryer, Robert; Hakan Friman; Darryl Robinson; Elizabeth Wilmshurst, 2007, An Introduction to International Criminal Law and Procedure).

While the court martials of 1915/1916 can certainly be seen as insufficient, they can not be called farce. Though I am confident that someone like Vahakn Dadrian would deem them as farce. He is someone that prefers to continue to use forged documents after they've been exposed as forgeries even though some of his Armenian colleagues distanced themselves from such documents. I'm sure you can find many people that people would blame for various crimes. Some would surely be guilty, many also would not be. If you're not gonna consider Malta trials as a separate trial you could at least not use the term "trials" to describe them. Malta tribunals were trials that were ended prematurely due to lack of evidence found for the detainees. There are ample amount of letters back and forth between British and US officials expressing the failure to find anything in that regard. The court martials of 1919/1920 similarly requested the findings of the Malta tribunals only to be told that there was nothing that could be used. Yet, unrelated and questionable points, such as the ones you mention, are used to excuse away such failures generated by these courts.

No. There are historians who mapped the routes the Armenian relocation to their ends, and these are some of the final destinations they have reported: the Kemah Gorge (source: Kaiser 2019, first section, Kemah: the economy of a slaughterhouse), Lake Hazar (source: Kevorkian, 2014), the Firincilar plain (source: both of them, same books), the Kahta highlands (source: Kevorkian, 2014; Kaiser, 2010; Akcam, 2018), the Murat river (source: Kerkovian, 2014), other sites in the Syrian desert (source: Ungor, 2012).

I hope this clears your questions.

We don't really need to rely on fantasies of such historians. There are ample amount of foreign documents showing these routes and the destinations. We know from US archives, for example, that about 500 thousand Armenians were in locations in and around major cities or town along the Euphrates river. My question remains unanswered. With hundreds of thousands more that fled to Russia, what kind of death march fails to kill even half its participants?

Ignoring most of the useless drivel in a post that reeks of desperation, just one thing:

Forceful relocation where hundreds of thousands die on the march is an act of genocide, Nebaki. Even the Turkish Foreign ministry admits that some government and military officials were deliberately attacking Armenians. According to the Turkish Foreign Ministry, there were about 1.5M Armenians living in Turkey before the Genocide and just 300K Armenians after the genocide, with ~700K exiled and ~500K dead. It is in DSL's post.
A force relocation of a certain ethnic group that ends up with 80% of that group being eliminated from the country, 50% of the group exiled, 30% dead and just 20% remaining, is called genocide.

The least Turkey could do is stop describing genocide with long words and use the word genocide.

Gross negligence is not genocide. You're obfuscating different concepts to keep the blame stick. What you're describing is not genocide, its ethnic cleansing. By your logic the population exchange between Greece and Turkey was a genocide.

[alhoon]

Gross negligence is not genocide. You're obfuscating different concepts to keep the blame stick. What you're describing is not genocide, its ethnic cleansing. By your logic the population exchange between Greece and Turkey was a genocide.

Is there a difference between ethnic cleansing and genocide? Don't get stuck in the semantics and split hairs in definitions of either, please give a robust answer.
Because "gross negligence" when forcefully expelling 1.2M people out of 1.5M people with 500K of them dying on the way is a bit... too soft a characterization. There is one word that describes the process of forceful expulsion of people where a large part of them die and that word is genocide.

The word genocide was (If I recall Correctly) created to describe what happened to the Armenians between 1915-1923.
To give you an exaggerated example to explain my position: If Turkish paramilitaries and officials have sold the Armenian villages to rich Europeans, then genocide would also include financial motives and the definition would be "destruction in whole or in part of an ethnic, cultural or religious group for purity and financial gain" and what happened in Rwanda would NOT have been genocide because it wasn't financially motivated.


In the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the death marches were the minority, the attacks on either group by paramilitaries on the way was not ignored by the states in question and... still I would call it grey area.
The pogroms of 1950s, I would call ethnoreligious groups clashing, not genocide. But that's because the numbers killed were not immense.


And you have not answered me whether you consider the Rohingya genocide as genocide or not. Because I do. And many states do and as far as I can tell while this genocide is ongoing there is less concern about an active genocide and millions of people suffering and being uprooted from their ancestral lands, than for what happened to the Armenians 100 years ago.
I am not saying what happened 100 years ago to the Armenians is in anything less than tragic, but it has happened. And yet, there's little effort to stop the Rohingya genocide.

what kind of death march fails to kill even half its participants?

Most death marches actually. Including the Death Marches of the Armenians.
Here's a death march of 60-80K prisoners, out of which 5-18K died. That is, AT MOST 1/3 of the prisoners and it is condemnable and horrific.

This wikipedia list includes other such examples of death marches that were less effective than the ones the Armenians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks faced.

We call the Trail of Tears an act of Genocide and about 20%-25% of those participating in this act of genocide actually died.

[sumskilz]

Is there a difference between ethnic cleansing and genocide?

Yeah, theoretically ethnic cleansing could take place without anyone being killed, whereas genocide is ethnic cleansing accomplished via mass murder. So genocide is a subset of ethnic cleansing. After WWII, Poland was ethnically cleansed of Germans, but no one refers to that as genocide.

[Kritias]

So, you agree that Greeks committed genocide against Morea Turks during their war of independence?

That’s a bad faith question. Let me answer it with a bad faith argument: yes, it was – as were all of the times the Ottomans massacred Greek, and other populations throughout the 14th-19th centuries. Unless you’re willing to debate that the Ottomans did not routinely allow massacres to happen in their Empire. Some examples here (I hope you can access it).

For starters, there is no such historical evidence other than a few statements mentioned in some memoir books. This is easily explained by the discrepancy between sources that make those "blame" claims and the actual personal memoirs they're based on. For example, US ambassador portrays Talat Pasha as "bloodthirsty and ferocious" in his published book while his personal notes and letters to the state department notes how he had cordial and intimate relationship with Talat and Enver who expressed him their desire to protect Armenians that are being relocated. Many military orders passed down to local commanders to allocate additional resources to well-being of deportees support that notion. That's one example. Hence, this battle is distorted as if it was suggested as the sole reason for Ottoman action against Armenians.

It wasn't. It's true that Armenians played a role during that battle. Garegin Pasdermadjian, a high-ranking member of ARF, himself boasts of how they cut off communications of the 3rd army to help the Russians. The weapons that were found scattered through out eastern Anatolia was a testament to the existence of Armenian gangs that were known to be active behind front lines to hurt the Ottoman forces. Its a well-established fact that Armenian groups did conspire against the Ottomans to help Russians in the hopes that they'd get their own state. The trick here is that in order to ignore or dismiss widespread Armenian activity people prefer to focus on individual cases like the Sarıkamış battle. They prefer to ignore the Van rebellion in April 1915 that preceded the relocation orders.

I gave you several historians who all cite the time around the Sarikamish battle as the beginning point where Armenians are perceived as a hostile body to be cut off from the Empire. I do not deny that Armenians had their own nationalist movement, or that they wanted to break free from the Ottoman Empire. I do not also deny the fact that some Armenians took up arms against the Ottomans during their nationalist struggle. It still doesn’t justify their genocide. Apparently, you missed this point in my OP:

Popular culture has ingrained in us the idea of a clear-cut divide between the genocidal state and its innocent victims. This idea stems primarily through depicting the Holocaust as the primary example of a genocide where such a divide is very, very clear. However, in the broader sense of history such divides are not always clear cut; it is possible for a nation to simultaneously be both the victim of a genocide and perpetrator of other, lesser aggressions towards the perpetrator, like terrorism for example. This is where the controversy kicks in; the state conducting the genocide will often point towards lesser crimes committed (or allegedly committed) by the targeted population to justify its use of terror against them; and governments involved in similar tactics (either in the present or past) will usually be very cautious to recognize the event as a genocide for their own selfish reasons.

While the court martials of 1915/1916 can certainly be seen as insufficient, they cannot be called farce. Though I am confident that someone like Vahakn Dadrian would deem them as farce. He is someone that prefers to continue to use forged documents after they've been exposed as forgeries even though some of his Armenian colleagues distanced themselves from such documents. I'm sure you can find many people that people would blame for various crimes. Some would surely be guilty, many also would not be. If you're not gonna consider Malta trials as a separate trial you could at least not use the term "trials" to describe them. Malta tribunals were trials that were ended prematurely due to lack of evidence found for the detainees. There are ample amount of letters back and forth between British and US officials expressing the failure to find anything in that regard. The court martials of 1919/1920 similarly requested the findings of the Malta tribunals only to be told that there was nothing that could be used. Yet, unrelated and questionable points, such as the ones you mention, are used to excuse away such failures generated by these courts.

Dadrian writes that the acting British admiral called the proceedings a farse, it’s not his own value judgement on the issue (source: Public Record Office, Foreign Office, 371/4174/136069 in Dadrian, Vahakn, 2003, The History of the Armenian Genocide). The bold parts is where we disagree; the issue wasn’t that there were no evidence to prove the genocide, or who were the accomplices; the issue was that the US and the British were in disagreement over what exactly to try the Ottomans with. The British coined the term ‘crimes against humanity’, which the Americans saw as ill-defined and too broad, and rejected it because it was running against their idea of sovereign right of a state to do with its people what it wished (source: Cryer, Robert; Hakan Friman; Darryl Robinson; Elizabeth Wilmshurst, 2007, An Introduction to International Criminal Law and Procedure.) Now, if you have something to counter what this book claims, I’d like to see it.

We don't really need to rely on fantasies of such historians. There are ample amount of foreign documents showing these routes and the destinations. We know from US archives, for example, that about 500 thousand Armenians were in locations in and around major cities or town along the Euphrates river. My question remains unanswered. With hundreds of thousands more that fled to Russia, what kind of death march fails to kill even half its participants?

How can you be so sure these are fantasies? Do you have any proof or counterargument to support your claim besides the document you shared? Because the document you provide is dated February 8, 1916. That’s a year since the start of the genocide. Can you prove somehow that even these five hundred thousand people were still alive by 1923, where the Armenian genocide allegedly ends? Also, if one in every two persons did not make it out alive through the death marches – that’s still a harrowing number of people, and an amazing feat for a country back in 1915; historically speaking, it wasn’t very easy to kill large amounts of people very, very fast, at least not until the complete industrialization of nations that paved the way for the death factories.

[PointOfViewGun]

Is there a difference between ethnic cleansing and genocide? Don't get stuck in the semantics and split hairs in definitions of either, please give a robust answer.
Because "gross negligence" when forcefully expelling 1.2M people out of 1.5M people with 500K of them dying on the way is a bit... too soft a characterization. There is one word that describes the process of forceful expulsion of people where a large part of them die and that word is genocide.

If you equate ethnic cleansing with genocide then there is little to discuss here. The whole point of the allegations is semantics. You're obfuscating too many different concepts to make an allegation stick. This is a very problematic approach. 1.2 million people were not expelled. About 900 thousand of them were meant to be relocated. Explusion happens if you send people out of your country. Armenians were to be resettled in the Ephrates river regions of the Ottoman empire. Not all 900 thousand of them could be relocated. Couple of hundred thousand of them fled to Russia to join the Russian army or live there. Many were already dead within village to village ethnic clases. Many were already dead because of the famine the empire itself was going through. Most Ottoman soldiers had little to eat on the fronts. Many were already dead because of diseases. But, somehow, we're to believe that all of them died in the middle of the desert...

The word genocide was (If I recall Correctly) created to describe what happened to the Armenians between 1915-1923.
To give you an exaggerated example to explain my position: If Turkish paramilitaries and officials have sold the Armenian villages to rich Europeans, then genocide would also include financial motives and the definition would be "destruction in whole or in part of an ethnic, cultural or religious group for purity and financial gain" and what happened in Rwanda would NOT have been genocide because it wasn't financially motivated.

Again, you're diluting the issue in a very bizarre manner. What you're saying doesn't add anything to the discussion. The definition of genocide is quite specific; targeting a particular group of people to destroy them (not remove/relocate) in part or in whole.

It's a myth that Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide for the Armenians. Do you know which other genocides his book "Introduction to the Study of Genocide" mentioned? There were 41 cases. Number 39 on his book was the case of Armenians. Number 9? "Genocide by the Greeks against the Turks." His book from 1944 where he used the term "genocide" for the first time and listed a number of examples had no mention of Armenians. His own answer to the question of when he got interested in the subjected changed with audience. When he talked to CBS he mentioned Armenians. When he talked to Italians he mentioned Romans killing Christians. If he ever came to Turkey at the time he'd likely mention Greeks killing Turks. Based on his papers we can also see that he made no primary research and purely relied on Arnold J. Toynbee, British propagandist creating documents against enemies, and Henry Morgenthau, whose only source of information was a number of Armenians. There is little value of Lemkin but some love to make him the champion of Armenian genocide recognition.

In the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the death marches were the minority, the attacks on either group by paramilitaries on the way was not ignored by the states in question and... still I would call it grey area.
The pogroms of 1950s, I would call ethnoreligious groups clashing, not genocide. But that's because the numbers killed were not immense.

Ah, so it's not necessarily ethnic cleansing. You're introducing new criteria. The law doesn't say if death marches were the minority it's OK.

And you have not answered me whether you consider the Rohingya genocide as genocide or not. Because I do. And many states do and as far as I can tell while this genocide is ongoing there is less concern about an active genocide and millions of people suffering and being uprooted from their ancestral lands, than for what happened to the Armenians 100 years ago.
I am not saying what happened 100 years ago to the Armenians is in anything less than tragic, but it has happened. And yet, there's little effort to stop the Rohingya genocide.

Can you really ask me about Rohingya when you ignore the case of Morea Turks? I don't have enough knowledge on their case at the top of my head to give a definitive answer.

Most death marches actually. Including the Death Marches of the Armenians.
Here's a death march of 60-80K prisoners, out of which 5-18K died. That is, AT MOST 1/3 of the prisoners and it is condemnable and horrific.

This is a rather distorted concept. Is it marching of prisoners where death occurs? Or is it marching of people with the intention to exhaust them and kill them off? I don't consider the former a death march. Hence, what Armenians endured was no death march. It was not made through desert as its romanticized to be. Not all of them, or even most of them, died along these marches. Not all of them were marched at all with some taking the train. Many were killed in ethnic clashes between Muslim and Christian villages. 2.5 million Muslim died because of the same reasons; ethnic clashes, diseases, famine, etc. It's very problematic to obfuscate such a delicate and complex matter to decsribe that 1/3rd of the prisoned Armenians were killed off in marches. That's not true.

[Kritias]

It's a myth that Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide for the Armenians. Do you know which other genocides his book "Introduction to the Study of Genocide" mentioned? There were 41 cases. Number 39 on his book was the case of Armenians. Number 9? "Genocide by the Greeks against the Turks." His book from 1944 where he used the term "genocide" for the first time and listed a number of examples had no mention of Armenians. His own answer to the question of when he got interested in the subjected changed with audience. When he talked to CBS he mentioned Armenians. When he talked to Italians he mentioned Romans killing Christians. If he ever came to Turkey at the time he'd likely mention Greeks killing Turks. Based on his papers we can also see that he made no primary research and purely relied on Arnold J. Toynbee, British propagandist creating documents against enemies, and Henry Morgenthau, whose only source of information was a number of Armenians. There is little value of Lemkin but some love to make him the champion of Armenian genocide recognition.

Ummm, I'm sorry to break it to you but Lemkin didn't write a book called "Introduction to the Study of Genocide". Here's his complete bibliography:

The Polish Penal Code of 1932 and The Law of Minor Offenses. Translated by McDermott, Malcolm; Lemkin, Raphael. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 1939.
Lemkin, Raphael (1933). Acts Constituting a General (Transnational) Danger Considered as Offences Against the Law of Nations (5th Conference for the Unification of Penal Law). Madrid.
Lemkin, Raphael (1939). La réglementation des paiements internationaux; traité de droit comparé sur les devises, le clearing et les accords de paiements, les conflits des lois. Paris: A. Pedone.
Lemkin, Raphael (1942). Key laws, decrees and regulations issued by the Axis in occupied Europe. Washington: Board of Economic Warfare, Blockade and Supply Branch, Reoccupation Division.
Lemkin, Raphael (1943). Axis rule in occupied Europe : laws of occupation, analysis of government, proposals for redress. Clark, N.J: Lawbook Exchange. ISBN 978-1-58477-901-8.
Lemkin, Raphael (April 1945). "Genocide - A Modern Crime". Free World. New York. 9 (4): 39–43.
Lemkin, Raphael (April 1946). "The Crime of Genocide". American Scholar. 15 (2): 227–230.
"Genocide: A Commentary on the Convention". Yale Law Journal. 58 (7): 1142–56. June 1949. doi:10.2307/792930. JSTOR 792930.
Stone, Dan (2013). The Holocaust, Fascism, and memory : essays in the history of ideas (Chapt 2). Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-137-02952-2.
Lemkin, Raphael, Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine (Kingston: Kashtan Press, 2014)

I also searched online, there's no book titled "Introduction to the Study of Genocide". I'm assuming you have the wrong title. Unless you mean Meierhenrich's Genocide: A Reader, where there's a chapter called "Introduction to the Study and History of Genocide". Care to correct yourself?

[alhoon]

Yeah, theoretically ethnic cleansing could take place without anyone being killed, whereas genocide is ethnic cleansing accomplished via mass murder. So genocide is a subset of ethnic cleansing. After WWII, Poland was ethnically cleansed of Germans, but no one refers to that as genocide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German...e#East_Prussia

"According to West German figures out of a pre-war German speaking population (deutschsprachige Bewohner) in East-Prussia of 2,473,000; 511,000 were killed or missing (including 210,000 military personnel). Some 301,000 civilians died due to the wartime flight and post-war expulsions. In total, some 1,200,000 people managed to escape to Germany, while about 800,000 pre-war inhabitants remained in East Prussia as of the summer of 1945"

Out of 2.5M people, 500K killed, 1.2M kicked out and 800K remained. It was organized effort against the German ethnicity to eradicate them from Eastern Prussia.
That's genocide.
Germans were being forcefully kicked out from lands that where their homes since 800AD and were vitally significant to German History (i.e. Prussia, the birthplace of Frederik the Great, Bismarck and modern Germany) because of the crimes the Nazis did. And we're talking millions here too. That's EXACTLY like the Armenian genocide both in brutality and numbers.
Saying this was not genocide is just a political move because "Germans 1945 bad" and nothing else.

Yes, the Germans in Poland did horrible crimes. But that just gives some justification for the anger of the locals or the crimes of the communist regime. It is still wrong.

[sumskilz]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German...e#East_Prussia

"According to West German figures out of a pre-war German speaking population (deutschsprachige Bewohner) in East-Prussia of 2,473,000; 511,000 were killed or missing (including 210,000 military personnel). Some 301,000 civilians died due to the wartime flight and post-war expulsions. In total, some 1,200,000 people managed to escape to Germany, while about 800,000 pre-war inhabitants remained in East Prussia as of the summer of 1945"

Out of 2.5M people, 500K killed, 1.2M kicked out and 800K remained. It was organized effort against the German ethnicity to eradicate them from Eastern Prussia.
That's genocide.
Germans were being forcefully kicked out from lands that where their homes since 800AD and were vitally significant to German History (i.e. Prussia, the birthplace of Frederik the Great, Bismarck and modern Germany) because of the crimes the Nazis did. And we're talking millions here too. That's EXACTLY like the Armenian genocide both in brutality and numbers.
Saying this was not genocide is just a political move because "Germans 1945 bad" and nothing else.

Yes, the Germans in Poland did horrible crimes. But that just gives some justification for the anger of the locals or the crimes of the communist regime. It is still wrong.

Eastern Prussia didn't become part of Poland, so that's not what I was talking about:

West German government figures of those evacuated, migrated, or expelled by 1950 totaled 8,030,000. (6,981,000 former German territories; 290,800 from Danzig, 688,000 pre-war Poland and 170,000 Baltic Germans resettled in Poland during the war).[29]

EDIT: Or more accurately, the northeastern part of East Prussia didn't become part of Poland, but the real distinction is that I was referring to Poland's treatment of Germans after the war, not the Soviet treatment of Germans during the war.

If you conflate every expulsion with genocide, it undermines the argument that what was done to the Armenians was particularly egregious.

[PointOfViewGun]

That’s a bad faith question. Let me answer it with a bad faith argument: yes, it was – as were all of the times the Ottomans massacred Greek, and other populations throughout the 14th-19th centuries. Unless you’re willing to debate that the Ottomans did not routinely allow massacres to happen in their Empire. Some examples here (I hope you can access it).

It's not a bad faith question at all. It merely helps to expose standards as while even though you say "yes" here such other instances are ignored or dismissed. Nobody calls Greece to acknowledge decimation of Morea Turks.

I gave you several historians who all cite the time around the Sarikamish battle as the beginning point where Armenians are perceived as a hostile body to be cut off from the Empire. I do not deny that Armenians had their own nationalist movement, or that they wanted to break free from the Ottoman Empire. I do not also deny the fact that some Armenians took up arms against the Ottomans during their nationalist struggle. It still doesn’t justify their genocide. Apparently, you missed this point in my OP:

Nobody is justifying any genocide or terror of anything. You can drop that line. It's a popular cop out for people trying to take a step back. I don't take that lightly... Sarıkamış wasn't the first time Armenians took a hostile step against the Ottomans, nor it was a high point for that. It simply works better compared to an actual rebellion that saw its Muslim occupants massacred.

Dadrian writes that the acting British admiral called the proceedings a farse, it’s not his own value judgement on the issue (source: Public Record Office, Foreign Office, 371/4174/136069 in Dadrian, Vahakn, 2003, The History of the Armenian Genocide). The bold parts is where we disagree; the issue wasn’t that there were no evidence to prove the genocide, or who were the accomplices; the issue was that the US and the British were in disagreement over what exactly to try the Ottomans with. The British coined the term ‘crimes against humanity’, which the Americans saw as ill-defined and too broad, and rejected it because it was running against their idea of sovereign right of a state to do with its people what it wished (source: Cryer, Robert; Hakan Friman; Darryl Robinson; Elizabeth Wilmshurst, 2007, An Introduction to International Criminal Law and Procedure.) Now, if you have something to counter what this book claims, I’d like to see it.

Either you or Dadrian is confused about this. Admiral Calthorpe wrote to the foreign office “proving to be a farce and injurious to our own prestige and to that of the Turkish government” in his letter dated August 1st, 1919 (FO 371/4174/E.118377). Can you confirm if it's a misread by you or an outright falsification by Dadrian? This is serious. If he's using a comment made for the court martials of 1919/1920 as if they were made for 1915/1916 its am important forgery. Similarly, its a matter of public record that no evidence could be produced in Malta. The requests and responses between the British and the US shows that there were no evidence whatsoever to try the prisoners on. In fact, the British foreign ministry even requested from the prosecutor to cook up some political charges in the absence of any legal crime though the prosecutor refused.

How can you be so sure these are fantasies? Do you have any proof or counterargument to support your claim besides the document you shared? Because the document you provide is dated February 8, 1916. That’s a year since the start of the genocide. Can you prove somehow that even these five hundred thousand people were still alive by 1923, where the Armenian genocide allegedly ends? Also, if one in every two persons did not make it out alive through the death marches – that’s still a harrowing number of people, and an amazing feat for a country back in 1915; historically speaking, it wasn’t very easy to kill large amounts of people very, very fast, at least not until the complete industrialization of nations that paved the way for the death factories.

They are fantasies because they are not aligned with primary sources. By November 1922, we know that about 1.2 million Armenians from pre-WWI Ottoman empire territories were still alive. As I explained to alhoon its a misconception that 1 million were made to march and that only half survived.

About 900 thousand of them were meant to be relocated. Armenians were to be resettled in the Ephrates river regions of the Ottoman empire. Not all 900 thousand of them could be relocated. Couple of hundred thousand of them fled to Russia to join the Russian army or live there. Many were already dead within village to village ethnic clases. Many were already dead because of the famine the empire itself was going through. Most Ottoman soldiers had little to eat on the fronts. Many were already dead because of diseases. But, somehow, we're to believe that all of them died in the middle of the desert...

Ummm, I'm sorry to break it to you but Lemkin didn't write a book called "Introduction to the Study of Genocide". Here's his complete bibliography:

The Polish Penal Code of 1932 and The Law of Minor Offenses. Translated by McDermott, Malcolm; Lemkin, Raphael. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 1939.
Lemkin, Raphael (1933). Acts Constituting a General (Transnational) Danger Considered as Offences Against the Law of Nations (5th Conference for the Unification of Penal Law). Madrid.
Lemkin, Raphael (1939). La réglementation des paiements internationaux; traité de droit comparé sur les devises, le clearing et les accords de paiements, les conflits des lois. Paris: A. Pedone.
Lemkin, Raphael (1942). Key laws, decrees and regulations issued by the Axis in occupied Europe. Washington: Board of Economic Warfare, Blockade and Supply Branch, Reoccupation Division.
Lemkin, Raphael (1943). Axis rule in occupied Europe : laws of occupation, analysis of government, proposals for redress. Clark, N.J: Lawbook Exchange. ISBN 978-1-58477-901-8.
Lemkin, Raphael (April 1945). "Genocide - A Modern Crime". Free World. New York. 9 (4): 39–43.
Lemkin, Raphael (April 1946). "The Crime of Genocide". American Scholar. 15 (2): 227–230.
"Genocide: A Commentary on the Convention". Yale Law Journal. 58 (7): 1142–56. June 1949. doi:10.2307/792930. JSTOR 792930.
Stone, Dan (2013). The Holocaust, Fascism, and memory : essays in the history of ideas (Chapt 2). Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-137-02952-2.
Lemkin, Raphael, Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine (Kingston: Kashtan Press, 2014)

I also searched online, there's no book titled "Introduction to the Study of Genocide". I'm assuming you have the wrong title. Unless you mean Meierhenrich's Genocide: A Reader, where there's a chapter called "Introduction to the Study and History of Genocide". Care to correct yourself?

The book I mentioned was not published at the time. It was later published under a slightly different name.

[alhoon]

If you conflate every expulsion with genocide, it undermines the argument that what was done to the Armenians was particularly egregious.

I don't conflate EVERY expulsion with genocide, but the Trail of Tears and the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Prussia during WW2 were acts of Genocide.
Again: In the event of Germans in Prussia hundreds of thousands dead, a million uprooted! And it was done systematically, targeting an ethnicity, by armies and militias with the central government looking the other way as they winked towards the people that were killing and forcefully relocating Germans.
That the Germans did the same to the Soviets previously, doesn't justify the USSR.

The atrocities that the Germans suffered were great. Not as great as those that suffered in the hands of SOME Germans but great none the less. Two wrongs, where the 2nd wrong is not as bad as the first, don't make a right.

[Sir Adrian]

Were they though? The definition of genocide says that

the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.

Were the east Prussian Germans deliberately killed off? Not really. You can argue that they were acts of ethnic cleansing, which is still a war crime, but not really a genocide. If you want a genocide you can look further north in the Baltics or futher south in Bessarabia. Those people were deported to death camps with the specific intent of making room for russian colonists. East Prussia germans were just evicted.

[sumskilz]

I don't conflate EVERY expulsion with genocide, but the Trail of Tears and the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Prussia during WW2 were acts of Genocide.
Again: In the event of Germans in Prussia hundreds of thousands dead, a million uprooted! And it was done systematically, targeting an ethnicity, by armies and militias with the central government looking the other way as they winked towards the people that were killing and forcefully relocating Germans.
That the Germans did the same to the Soviets previously, doesn't justify the USSR.

The atrocities that the Germans suffered were great. Not as great as those that suffered in the hands of SOME Germans but great none the less. Two wrongs, where the 2nd wrong is not as bad as the first, don't make a right.

You seem to be completely missing the point. There is a reason that ethnic cleansing and genocide are two separate terms, with the latter being a subset of the former. I gave you an example of an ethnically targeted mass expulsion that did not involve genocide - the treatment of Germans in Poland after WWII. Another example would be when Spain expelled all its Jews in 1492. This was not genocide. To say something was not genocide, is not synonymous with claiming that it was morally justified. What happened to the Armenians was an ethnic cleansing, a significant proportion of which was the result of genocide. These are just words of course, the facts remain the same whatever terms are used, but since POVG's position is to accept the former while denying the latter, you're not really making a coherent counter-argument when failing to understand and/or recognize the distinction.