Was Their Really An Armenian Genocide ? History Says No.

I have issued the command — and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad — that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness — for the present only in the East — with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians? -Adolf Hitler

That should speak volumes on whether or not it happened or not......one of the main reason Hitler moved forward with his plans is because people remained SILENT....despite the fact that it happened....

People in the region knew it happened....Hitler saw how people said nothing......

a reply to: ManBehindTheMask

You are correct. I have a couple friends that think like the OP and it is no coincidence that they are completely anti 2nd amendment. The Armenian Genocide may or may not be a misnomer in itself but it was a slaughter at the very least. The reason for that slaughter was the disarming of the Armenian people. Hitler believed that arming a "subject race" would lead to empirical downfall and proceeded to disarm the Jews emboldened by what he saw with the Armenians.

originally posted by: howmuch4another
a reply to: ManBehindTheMask

You are correct. I have a couple friends that think like the OP and it is no coincidence that they are completely anti 2nd amendment. The Armenian Genocide may or may not be a misnomer in itself but it was a slaughter at the very least. The reason for that slaughter was the disarming of the Armenian people. Hitler believed that arming a "subject race" would lead to empirical downfall and proceeded to disarm the Jews emboldened by what he saw with the Armenians.

Can i ask you how you came to the conclusion i am anti second amendment?

a reply to: Kapusta

I didn't and wasn't clear so please don't be offended. Let me be more clear. I said my friends that deny the Armenian Genocide were anti 2nd and it wasn't a coincidence because it (disarming being a contributing factor) offends their ideology.

Hope that cleans it up a bit.

originally posted by: howmuch4another
a reply to: Kapusta

I didn't and wasn't clear so please don't be offended. Let me be more clear. I said my friends that deny the Armenian Genocide were anti 2nd and it wasn't a coincidence because it (disarming being a contributing factor) offends their ideology.

Forgive me on my judgement.

My position is that i am not "anti genocide " I am just trying to figure out if It can be classed as a genocide based on the definition and the events that occurred.

I understand some members here would like to paint me as "anti" but i assure you I am not ,any evidence brought forth will be reviewed with. Unbias. And if I find out it was in fact a Genocide i will happily recant any stament that might support the notion of a genocide not occurring.



Hope that cleans it up a bit.

a reply to: Kapusta

Oh I understood your clarification on your position earlier in the thread. That is why I said it may or may not be a misnomer in my first post in thread. I think your thread descended into semantics so I just decided to call it a slaughter in my fairly feeble wording of my point. I'm sure we can all agree on the word slaughter.

a reply to: Kapusta

OH! Now I understand the hostility in this thread! I'm watching the news, and they're covering a huge march happening in Hollywood right now. They're interviewing the protesters, who want Obama to rule the Armenian "Massacre" as "Genocide" because that activates a whole set of benefits to Armenians in the way of "reparation", cash and land.

Follow the money! Always!

originally posted by: howmuch4another
a reply to: Kapusta

Oh I understood your clarification on your position earlier in the thread. That is why I said it may or may not be a misnomer in my first post in thread. I think your thread descended into semantics so I just decided to call it a slaughter in my fairly feeble wording of my point. I'm sure we can all agree on the word slaughter.

Absolutely!

Many people died in both sides .

I think a problem here also is it appears to be a certainty that Adolf Hitler mimicked the genocide with his own homicidal psychosis. That does seem to be the case and it does fit in with the timeline of events as he, being in the military at the time knew about it. He partook in WW1 right? So it is documented the he used that a s a "model".

Now, what i was thinking is if these things of such monumental atrociousness can be swept under the rug then what else has been?

I can only imagine the things we don't know about...hoo wee, must have been some real depravity we don't even know about.

Mans inhumanity to man...aka, sociopaths.

originally posted by: Flavian

originally posted by: greencmp
a reply to: Kapusta

On the anniversary of the genocide, Turkey decided to celebrate the defeat of the allies in Gallipoli instead, class folks for sure, real EU material.

As an ally from Europe, i don't have a problem with Turkey celebrating a victory. You can guarantee if we Brits had won, we'd have been crowing about it too.

Greece has been the main obstacle to Turkey joining, although as ManFromEurope points out, i think Greece have been used somewhat as cover for the rest of Europe dragging their heels - a bit of the usual two faced politik at international level - "of course my good man, we would love you to be members. It's just rather unfortunate that we can't help at the moment until ONE of our existing members changes their mind".

But they chose the anniversary of the Armenian genocide.

a reply to: Kapusta

I'm not sure about all the details but i tend to believe the Armenians. The Ottoman empire was scrambiling to maintain dominance and Armenia was in a very bad spot for a mass genocide. Also, its seems like the only thing stopping the USA from naming it a genocide is the threats from Turkey and Turkey being such an important NATO ally, kinda raised red flags for me.

I don't find it crazy that a genocide in that region occurred after WW1

Kapusta has posted this because he is a Muslim Apologist and is trying to deflect from the unspoken fact that the Ottoman Empire was Islamic and the Armenians were Christian. Kapusta can't have such a huge stain on his "religion of peace" by having the Islamic Ottoman Turks be responsible for the first official genocide, against Christians no less.

Wikipedia Quote:

Other indigenous and Christian ethnic groups such as the Assyrians and the Ottoman Greeks were similarly targeted for extermination by the Ottoman government, and their treatment is considered by many historians to be part of the same genocidal policy. The majority of Armenian diaspora communities around the world came into being as a direct result of the genocide. Raphael Lemkin was explicitly moved by the Armenian annihilation to coin the word genocide in 1943 or 1944[14] and define systematic and premeditated exterminations within legal parameters.[15] The Armenian Genocide is acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides,[16][17][18] because scholars point to the organized manner in which the killings were carried out in order to eliminate the Armenians, and it is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust.[19]

About Stanford Shaw.

In the second volume of the History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, which Shaw co-authored with his wife, Ezel Kural Shaw, and which was published in 1977 with the subtitle Reform, Revolution, and Republic: the Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808-1975, the Shaws put forward the controversial assertion that the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire had revolted in 1915 against the government and were thus justifiably removed from the war zone along the Russian border. Instead of holding that the deportations constituted an act of systematic genocide, the Shaws claimed that Ottoman authorities did their utmost to protect the deportees and characterize the Armenians, in the words of Richard G. Hovannisian, a professor of Armenian and Near Eastern History at UCLA, as "the victimizers rather than the victims, as the privileged rather than the oppressed, and the fabricators of unfounded tales of massacre."[10] The book also downplays the severity of the conditions of the deportation marches and instead presents them in a much more benign and pleasant light.[11] Hovannisian criticized the book for gross historical inaccuracies on the Armenian Question. He accused Shaw of misquoting his own works and deliberately ignoring the massive body of evidence supporting the factuality of the genocide, concluding, "What could have been – what should have been – a valuable text is instead an unfortunate example of nonscholarly selectivity and deceptive presentation."[12][13]

There was a "Nuremberg" Trial

It's World War I.

The Ottoman Empire was close to entering the war on the side of the Allies, but (among other reasons) the British pull a fast one by not delivering on a warship paid for by the common folks, down to the pennies of poor Turkish schoolchildren.
(War broke out, and the Brits figured they could make better use of their goods on hand... so they reneged on the deal.)
Meanwhile, Germany smells blood and brilliantly steps in by making a pseudo-gift of a couple of warships. Result: the road is better paved for the Ottoman Turks to join the Central Powers, a decision that will ultimately seal the fate of the centuries-old empire.

The British were noted for demonizing the enemy... the Germans were referred to as "Huns," for example.

Certainly, the Ottoman Turks were not let off the hook... it must not have been too tough to demonize an enemy that easily lent itself to demonization, since the days of the Crusades.


The usually false reports of massacres were a great foundation to build upon. (Armenians well learned the value of exploiting the "Christian" connection, accusing their Ottoman society — a society that was among the most tolerant of nations — of killing for religious reasons).

American missionaries, unable to convert the Turks, shrieked these rumors of massacres...

British journalists and historians ate it up.

Those Armenians, especially, were being slaughtered right and left. (After the war, some British historians such as Arnold Toynbee would somewhat apologize for being a little too hysterical on the issue. Unfortunately, the British government has not yet apologized to the Turkish government for the Britons' discredited Blue Book... even though Great Britain apologized to Germany in 1936 for the Britons' German version of the Blue Book.)

The war is over. The Versailles Treaty, as everyone knows, was terribly unfair, to the extent of sowing the seeds of Hitler's rise some dozen years later.

As unfair as this treaty might have been for Germany, the Ottoman Turks had it far worse. Their right of self-determination... flying in the face of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points... would be taken away from them!

The Allies planned to carve out the remains of the Ottoman Empire amongst themselves. (Even decades before WWI had broken out.)
The plan for the Turks was to live in what amounted to an Indian reservation. (Luckily for the Turks, this particular parallel to the American Indian did not come true.)

The fellow who mostly had it in for the Turks was Great Britain's Lloyd George. (A convinced pro Hellene who could have used anything as propaganda against the Turks in support of Venizelos and the Greek invasion of Turkey... just as Gladstone inflated the Bulgarian "massacres" out of all contact with reality for domestic political reasons. Curiously, Lloyd George, at the expense of his political career, ultimately did not.)

Maybe it was the chance for the British to get even for being humiliatingly held off at Gallipoli. Regardless, memories of those awful massacres being reported in the British press couldn't go unanswered.

Especially now that the British were occupying what was left of the Ottoman Empire. Every governmental document to prove evil wrongdoing was at their fingertips.

Consider: the British were no friends of the Turks at this time. (They planned to figuratively wipe the Turks off the face of the earth.)
Any evidence of a genocide that existed was at their full disposal, as an occupying force. To make sure the research efforts would be as zealously thorough as possible, they enlisted the services of a crack team of Armenian scholars, led by Haigazn K. Khazarian.

The British locked up close to a hundred and fifty Ottoman officials... fifty-six in the island of Malta... while they attempted to dig up the incriminating evidence.

They dig... and dig.... and dig. The process takes nearly two-and-one-half years, and even their Armenians weren't coming up with the necessary goods. (All the propaganda from the war years were dismissed as the malarkey they were.)

In their frustration, they actually appealed to the shores of America for proof.

What did they come up with?

ZILCH!

To the immense credit of the British and their respect for the rule of Law, they released every single one of the Ottoman officials. It would have been enormously easy to make up the evidence, in an attempt to save face.

This was the precursor to the Nuremberg Trials.

The Ottoman Turks were found INNOCENT.

The case was closed beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Isn't it mysterious that this rare example of a human tragedy actually winding up in court and getting cleared continues to still get tried... when countless other human tragedies that have occurred since have long been forgotten?

TALL ARMENIAN TALE - OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY

originally posted by: JDmOKI
a reply to: Kapusta

I'm not sure about all the details but i tend to believe the Armenians. The Ottoman empire was scrambiling to maintain dominance and Armenia was in a very bad spot for a mass genocide. Also, its seems like the only thing stopping the USA from naming it a genocide is the threats from Turkey and Turkey being such an important NATO ally, kinda raised red flags for me.

I don't find it crazy that a genocide in that region occurred after WW1

you will find eveything you need to know about that here www.tallarmeniantale.com...

a reply to: paraphi

Does genocide have to mean they intend to kill all or wipe all of them all out completely? What about the man who shot the Sikh temple a few years ago was he not trying to commit genocide against those people or not because he didn't kill all? A million people dead still qualifies as a genocide IMO.

a reply to: Kapusta

No you will find everything you need to know about it here...

History Channel

including this...

On April 24, 1915, the Armenian genocide began. That day, the Turkish government arrested and executed several hundred Armenian intellectuals. After that, ordinary Armenians were turned out of their homes and sent on death marches through the Mesopotamian desert without food or water. Frequently, the marchers were stripped naked and forced to walk under the scorching sun until they dropped dead. People who stopped to rest were shot.

And if you read about this man....

Talaat Pasha

you will also know this...

On 24 April 1915, Talaat Pasha issued an order to close all Armenian political organizations operating within the Ottoman Empire and arrest Armenians connected to them, justifying the action by stating that the organizations were controlled from outside the empire, were inciting upheavals behind the Ottoman lines, and were cooperating with Russian forces. This order resulted in the arrest on the night of 24/25 April 1915 of 235 to 270 Armenian community leaders in Istanbul, including politicians, clergymen, physicians, authors, journalists, lawyers, and teachers. Although the mass killings of Armenian civilians had begun in the Van vilayet several weeks earlier, these mass-arrests in Istanbul are considered by many commentators to be the start of the Armenian Genocide.[12]

and this...

Talaat, as minister of the interior, bears much of the responsibility for the deportation of the Armenians from the empire's eastern provinces to Syria. Most historians blame him for the barbarity of the operation and the deaths of millions of people (and not only of Armenian origin). Although Talaat was the minister of the interior, many historians argue that Enver Pasha deserves equal blame for the extermination of the Armenians.[14][15] He is reported to have said the following to Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr. in Ambassador Morgenthau's Story[16]

"I have accomplished more toward solving the Armenian problem in three months than Abdulhamid II accomplished in thirty years!"