Stevie said:

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artu said:

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the Holocaust and the Armenian Genicode are very different things in every aspect imaginable.

a very misleading oversimplification.

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Come on Markkur, tell me you don't see the irony behind such bombastic phrasing.

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M. Report,

6th Division of Calvary, Col. Muhammad

To: 6th Division of Calvary, Royal Command Center, G. Muhammad

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We have escorted 20 076 of the armenian peoples, aproximately of which 40% of women.  30% of youth, and 17% old, all other are adult to Islamabad from Istanbul.  
The march started 12.07.1915 ,
during the road was no casualties.
March ended 12.26.1915 .

The total amount of peoples that have arrived to the Islamabad 9 315, 425 youth, 2 old age, all others are adults, 22% of which are women.  
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Col. Muhammad, Abdul ibn Abdul ibn Abdul, ibn Abdul, idn Abdul
12.27.1915


6th Division of Calvary, Royal Command Center, G. Muhammad

To: 6th Division of Calvary, Col. Muhammad

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Well done, col. Muhammad, when the mission will be completed you will be honored,

The Order: We have obtained the order from the allholy Sultan himself according to it - you must  Take all peoples that came with you to the Islamabad, and make a march back to the Istanbul, the you need to connect a col. Abdul from 7th Infantry Division, you will get the further instructions about a new party. He is informed about your arriving.
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General Muhammad, Abdul ibn Abdul ibn Abdul, ibn Abdul, idn Abdul ...
12 28.1915

artu said:

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But the Ottoman government didn't care, Armenian lives were the least of their worries at the time. However, it's not some ideological wipe out like the Holocaust, their motive was not "to cleanse the world of the Armenian race." For instance, in Istanbul and Izmir, Armenians werent exiled since these were big cities not in danger of any local bloodshed. The Ottoman officers thought of themselves as on defense, unlike the Nazis. They were brutal because they believed that was the only way to save the state, and the way they were traditionally trained, you exist to serve the state and the Sultan.

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artu said:

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Except, there is no sweeping statement, I already emphasized that the genocide was in no way justifiable.

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artu said:

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Except, there is no sweeping statement, I already emphasized that the genocide was in no way justifiable. And it is already a given when you talk about any genocide, that many people lost their lives. Yet, since the Nazi holocaust is the most systematic, significant, ideological and memorable one in history, with thousands of documanteries, movies, books about it, people have a tendency to paste Nazi motives to any genocide and whenever one is on the table, there's always a mention and comparison to Hitler, which is indeed an oversimplification. If you read the definition of genocide from the 1948 UN convention, it's much broader than what the Nazis specifically intented. So, it's only natural to point out that the comparison is overreaching sometimes. St. Bartholomew's massacre is also genocidal yet no one happens to compare it to Auschwitz, do they?

Bernard Lewis

Unlike Lewis, I do think what happened should be called a genocide, the part I disagree with him, although he is the most prominent expert in Middle-East history, is that the officers of the Ottoman military were not as motivated as preventing the massacres as he claims. There were indeed ones who tried their best but most of them were fueled up with a counter-nationalism, since the empire was losing land after land and they simply allowed the violance to escelate. The Nazi comparison, however, only produces more deniers, which is already a very problematic attitude in my country.

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artu said:

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No, a collapsing empire in its last days, fighting in two fronts in a world war, out of money, out of soldiers, out of everything, was not highly centralized

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The Sultan, however, was not prepared to relinquish any power. Abdul Hamid believed that the woes of the Ottoman Empire stemmed from "the endless persecutions and hostilities of the Christian world."[8] He perceived the Ottoman Armenians to be an extension of foreign hostility, a means by which Europe could "get at our most vital places and tear out our very guts."[9] Turkish historian and Abdul Hamid's biographer Osman Nuri observed, "The mere mention of the word 'reform' irritated him [Abdul Hamid], inciting his criminal instincts."[10] Upon hearing of the Armenian delegation's visit to Berlin in 1878, he bitterly remarked, "Such great impudence...Such great treachery toward religion and state...May they be cursed upon by God."[11] While he admitted that some of their complaints were well-founded, he likened the Armenians to "hired female mourners [pleureuses] who simulate a pain they do not feel; they are an effeminate and cowardly people who hide behind the clothes of the great powers and raise an outcry for the smallest of causes."

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artu said:

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It was never run by Islamic Sharia Law, even when it comes to Muslim citizens, it was a merger of Sharia law and traditional law but it had cultural pluralism, an affair between two Armenians was handled by Armenian custom in courts.

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In the late 19th century, the non-Muslim population of the empire began to fall considerably, not only due to secession, but also because of migratory movements.[165] The proportion of Muslims amounted to 60% in the 1820s, gradually increasing to 69% in the 1870s and then to 76% in the 1890s.[165] By 1914, only 19.1% of the empire's population was non-Muslim, mostly made up of Christian Greeks, Assyrians, Armenians, and Jews

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The traditional decentralized Ottoman system became increasingly centralized; the central government extended its authority and activity to all areas of Ottoman life, undermining, though not entirely replacing, the millets and guilds. Since functions were expanding, moreover, the traditional Ottoman governmental system in which the ruling class acted through the imperial council was replaced with an increasingly complex system of government, divided into executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The executive was organized into ministries headed by ministers who came together in a cabinet led by the grand vizier. The legislative function was given to deliberative bodies, culminating in a partly representative council of state in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and in the democratically elected parliament introduced initially in 1877–1878 and then again in the Young Turk constitutional period (1908–1918). Administration was turned over to a new hierarchy of well-educated bureaucrats (memurs) who dominated Ottoman governmental life until the end of the empire. The reforms introduced during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed the Ottoman Empire into a relatively well-governed and modern state. Emphasis was laid, however, on institutional and physical reforms, with the centralized bureaucracy exercising far more control over the lives of the subjects than was the case in the traditional decentralized Ottoman system. As a result, liberal political movements, led by the Young Ottomans during the years of the Tanzimat and by the Young Turks during the reign of Abdülhamid II, demanded political and social reforms as well. For all the difficulties and deficiencies in the implementation of government-sponsored reforms, it is clear that the Tanzimat era initiated a process of social and economic change, the development of modern communications, including telegraph lines, and steam navigation.

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artu said:

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The 1.5 million is a highly controversial number, it's the end margin, lost of lives is estimated between 900.000 to 1.5 million and the reason the gap between the margins is so high is nobody can accurately estimate what happened during that chaos.

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artu said:

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Look, you said "Ottoman Empire had a straight ideology of Islamic theocracy" while it didn't and even if it did, a classical Islamic theocracy would not require to murder Christians . . .

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Ohh... I am trying so hard to not unleash a bucket of sarcasm over some turbans Because I will get a ban then .
So once again, like in the song of the Beetles

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According to Ottoman understanding, the state's primary responsibility was to defend and extend the land of the Muslims and to ensure security and harmony within its borders within the overarching context of orthodox Islamic practice and dynastic sovereignty.[124]

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The Ottoman legal system accepted the religious law over its subjects. At the same time the Qanun (or Kanun), a secular legal system, co-existed with religious law or Sharia.[131] The Ottoman Empire was always organized around a system of local jurisprudence. Legal administration in the Ottoman Empire was part of a larger scheme of balancing central and local authority.[132] Ottoman power revolved crucially around the administration of the rights to land, which gave a space for the local authority to develop the needs of the local millet.[132] The jurisdictional complexity of the Ottoman Empire was aimed to permit the integration of culturally and religiously different groups

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In the Ottoman imperial system, even though there existed an hegemonic power of Muslim control over the non-Muslim populations, non-Muslim communities had been granted state recognition and protection in the Islamic tradition.[166]   The officially accepted state Dīn (Madh'hab) of the Ottomans was Sunni (Hanafi jurisprudence).[3]

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Until the second half of the 15th century the empire had a Christian majority, under the rule of a Muslim minority.[132] In the late 19th century, the non-Muslim population of the empire began to fall considerably, not only due to secession, but also because of migratory movements.[166] The proportion of Muslims amounted to 60% in the 1820s, gradually increasing to 69% in the 1870s and then to 76% in the 1890s.[166] By 1914, only 19.1% of the empire's population was non-Muslim, mostly made up of Christian Greeks, Assyrians, Armenians, and Jews.[166]

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artu said:

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. . . these are not the crusades or jihad . . .

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Though the Young Turks had compelled the Sultan in his capacity as the Caliph to declare a jihad urging all Muslims to resist Allied encroachment on their lands, the effort was largely unsuccessful. The Young Turk government resigned en masse and Enver, Talat, and Cemal fled Turkey aboard a German warship. Sultan Mehmed VI, who was proclaimed Sultan after his brother Mehmed V died of a heart attack in July, agreed to an armistice. The Armistice of Mudros formalizing Ottoman surrender was signed aboard a British warship on October 30, 1918. Allied troops arrived in Constantinople and occupied the Sultan's palace shortly thereafter.[1]

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"The religion of Islam will be elevated if it will cease to be a political instrument, as had been the case in the past" - Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

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artu said:

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The only minimal factor of religion here is, its part as an ethnic diversity, not theology. But Arab Muslims who also rebelled were fought just as well and Jewish citizens who didn't were not touched. So, stop talking about  a historical situation which you have no idea about by misinterpreting a few paragraphs you recently read from wikipedia.

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artu said:

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There is almost 20 years between the Hamidian massacares  and the Armenian Genocide and Abdulhamid was overthrown from the throne by then, by the very people who were responsible for the genocide. They considered him a brute.

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artu said:

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As I said in the beginning, the last century of the empire is a century of struggling with nationalist uprisings, this creates a chain of bloody revolts and again bloody supressions of them. They are not one continuous incident though and they are not a systematic plan of cleansing races. Why would you leave out the Armenians in Istanbul and Izmir, where they are very populated, if your intention was to wipe out the whole race?

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. . . . .

On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic, well-planned and organized genocide of its Armenian citizens – an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years. The Armenian Genocide is corroborated by the international scholarly, legal, and human rights community:

1) Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term
genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the  Armenians and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he meant by genocide.

2) The killings of the Armenians is genocide as defined by the 1948
United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

3) In 1997 the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an organization of the world’s foremost experts on genocide, unanimously passed a formal resolution affirming the fact of the Armenian Genocide.

4) 126 leading scholars of the Holocaust including Elie Wiesel and Yehuda Bauer placed a statement in the
New York Times
in June 2000 declaring the “incontestable fact of the Armenian Genocide” and urging western democracies to acknowledge it. 5) The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (Jerusalem), and the Institute for the Study of Genocide (NYC), have affirmed the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide. 6) Every book on comparative genocide in the English language contains a segment on the Armenian Genocide. Leading texts in the international law of genocide such as William A. Schabas’s
Genocide in International Law
(Cambridge University Press, 2000) cite the Armenian Genocide as a precursor to the Holocaust and as a precedent for the law on crimes against humanity.
Roger Smith, Eric Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton wrote in “Professional Ethics and the Denial of the  Armenian Genocide” (
Holocaust and Genocide Studies ): “Where scholars deny genocide in the face of decisive evidence . . . they contribute to false consciousness that can have the most dire reverberations. Their message, in effect, is . . . mass murder requires no confrontation, but should be ignored, glossed over. In this way scholars lend their considerable authority to the acceptance of this ultimate crime.” . . . .

We note that there may be differing interpretations of how and why the Armenian Genocide happened, but to deny its factual and moral reality as genocide is not to engage in scholarship but in  propaganda and efforts to absolve the perpetrator, blame the victims, and erase the ethical meaning of this history.

. . .

Whatever the agendas or tactics are of the few non-Turkish historians who support the Turkish government’s version of history, their claims are the same:

1) all the documents that scholars have used for decades to write about the Armenian Genocide are forgeries or otherwise unreliable;

2) the Young Turk regime did not intend to destroy the Armenian population – the massive deaths were a result of war, not genocide;

3) these were hard times for the Ottoman Empire and many Turkish people, especially soldiers, died, as did Armenian civilians, from famine, disease, wartime chaos, not from systematic slaughter;

4) the Armenians are to blame for their fate because they were a Fifth Column allied with Turkey’s enemy, the Russians, who were fighting against the Ottoman Empire in World War I, somehow even justifying the massacre of Armenian women and children

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The Armenian Genocide 1915-1923, by Armenian National Commitee of America -
www.anca.orgr

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artu said:

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And during the 19th century, the state buroaucracy was modernized and centralized yes . . .

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artu said:

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This mechanism did not function quite efficiently during WW 1, since the empire was just about to collapse. The events are not the result of a cleancut, efficient hierarchy, on the contrary, the hierarchical order is malfunctioning in most of the cases, which officially commands exile, not massacre.

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artu said:

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Frostysh, do you realize that most of the stuff you quoted in bold actually supports what I have said in the first place.

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artu said:

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But the Ottoman government didn't care, Armenian lives were the least of their worries at the time. However, it's not some ideological wipe out like the Holocaust, their motive was not "to cleanse the world of the Armenian race." For instance, in Istanbul and Izmir, Armenians werent exiled since these were big cities not in danger of any local bloodshed. The Ottoman officers thought of themselves as on defense, unlike the Nazis. They were brutal because they believed that was the only way to save the state, and the way they were traditionally trained, you exist to serve the state and the Sultan.

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artu said:

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The ontological difference is not that Jews were seen as a menace next door, yet Armenians were not. To Nazis, Jews were seen as "eroding" not because of what they did or what they might do in the future. They were eroding by their very existence, even if a Jew enlisted in the Nazi Party, shouted out Heil Hitler in all sincerity, it wouldn't have mattered. They were considered sub-human. A Jew who may wish to convert (which is not even hypothetically possible from a Nazi perspective) was still dangerous, not defeated, because "the threat of their race" was seen as a contagion, not something political.

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artu said:

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You know nothing about the Young Turks, they are not "radical muslims" or anything of that sort. Sultans declare jihad in any declarance of war, it's just a formality. Most of the Young Turks which you claim that knew nothing about the world except Islam had been educated in Europe and they wrote love poems to their fiancees in French. You are absolutely clueless about what you imagine.

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artu said:

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I'm an atheist who is very anti-religious but connecting the genocide to Islamic fundamentalism is the most ignorant thing anybody could do. And stop acting like I'm saying there had been no genocide, that's not what I said. I said their motive was not to wipe out a race out of existence and a nationalist conflict triggered things.

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artu said:

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There is almost 20 years between the Hamidian massacares  and the Armenian Genocide and Abdulhamid was overthrown from the throne by then, by the very people who were responsible for the genocide. They considered him a brute. As I said in the beginning, the last century of the empire is a century of struggling with nationalist uprisings, this creates a chain of bloody revolts and again bloody supressions of them. They are not one continuous incident though and they are not a systematic plan of cleansing races. Why would you leave out the Armenians in Istanbul and Izmir, where they are very populated, if your intention was to wipe out the whole race?

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artu said:

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There is certainly no systematic link between the Hamidian massacares and the Armenian genocide, no matter what you imagine without any support or evidence. They are done by different people in different times. Unlike you, I read those "boring" books and had read 3 books on the genocide. (And only one of them was supporting the Turkish argument.)

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artu said:

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Normally, I don't respond to any of your trolling but this is a sensitive subject and you should not be spreading such meaningless disinformation.

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artu said:

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The deportation was of course systematic

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artu said:

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what I said was there was no systematic continuity between the Hamidian massacares and the 1915 deportations which are years apart and done by different people

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artu said:

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It seems that you dont even know the legal definition of genocide, deportation or even asimilation based on ethnicity is also part of what constitutes a genocide

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Believes that the refusal by the present Turkish Government to acknowledge the genocide against the Armenian people committed by the Young Turk government . . .

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artu said:

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What you seem to be stubborn not to understand and what those scholars will also agree on is simply this: The deportation was systematic and planned, the deaths caused by the deportation process was predictable and overlooked, so the people who organized it are still responsible for the deaths themselves. But the killings were not systematically planned and they were not the premeditated goal. The unsuccessful primary goal was to end the nationalistic conflict and the uprisings caused by them.

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On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic, well-planned and organized genocide of its Armenian citizens . . .

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