Turkey still actively goes out of its way to suppress this knowledge. They even threaten some sort of retribution on the world stage if you call it genocide. Sanctions, severing diplomatic ties, etc
And Turkey gave [large amounts](https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2023/04/princeton-armenian-genocide-education-honesty-trauma-curriculum) of money to Princeton University to deny the genocide.
Justin McCathy was [fired](https://www.reddit.com/r/byebyejob/comments/xp5dxg/lowlife_armenian_genocide_denying_history/) from the University of Louisville for his genocide denial, including several books claiming that the genocide did not happen.
TY, I had trouble recalling specific events. I do remember seeing a website taken down by hackers for supposedly insulting Turkey.
They even make Japan's ignoring WW2 war crimes look like they are shouting from the rooftops.
There’s lots more ofc, the assassination of Hrant Dink, blowing up medieval Armenian monasteries and churches, the way that archaeological and historic sites are destroyed by looters and the government does nothing (look up Ermeni hazeni on YouTube)
See https://armenianweekly.com/2020/07/09/hunters-of-armenian-treasures/
Turkey is definitely worse than Japan when it comes to denying it's past war crimes. Japan kinda just doesn't teach it in their schools but won't actively threaten, bribe, or take any other action against other countries for saying that Japan commited such terrible crimes in WWII.
Japan doesn't even refuse to teach it in schools. Don't know where that meme came from, but it's not true. There are some private schools with private curriculum who teach their own stuff, but public schools do go over the war. They are rather dry and straightforward, but that's all you can expect from public school anyways.
To add to this turkey also controls a strategically vital strait controlling access to the Black Sea. So politically it’s difficult to even broach the subject since turkey regularly threatens to take the political equivalent of the nuclear option when the subject is so much as mentioned.
Recently watched a vice documentary on YouTube, showing the news coverage (or lack there of) of the protests in gezi, and how the local channels were showing animal documentaries instead to hide what was going on.
It’s interesting and important histories. It’s the systems in place
My public school board in canada was threatened by the Turkish embassy for introducing a high school elective course on genocides that mentions the Armenian genocide.
Think of who was the victim of the genocides. Armenians and Greeks don't have a lot of focus anyway in news, media, etc especially when these genocides occured during WW1 and in the chaotic years after. A modern parallel to this is what's happening in the DRC with very little coverage.
Plus Turkey is geostrategically important so no big players want to address that (see their current ethnic cleansing of Kurds being ignored by NATO)
Yup especially with the fact that Armenia is aligned with Russia so they're basically an enemy of the west today even though they don't really have any other choice
For some reason people just don’t care about Armenians. I mean, I care — I followed the news about the displacement and donated money to the Armenia food bank— but the general reaction from others is a big fat “meh.” I’ll never understand why some people’s lives matter and others don’t. It’s so arbitrary.
Considering they were the first official Christian nation on earth and even much of Christiandom sorta turns a blind eye. Odd. I fin Armenia fascinating and have always wanted to visit.
That's just cover for Jew/Israel rage though. Syria ethnically cleansed so many more Muslims and in such horrific ways that the photographs are being used to demonize Israel instead. Nobody cared enough about those photographs when it was Sunni vs Shia.
A few reasons:
* Geopolitics - Turkey was and remains a very important country in terms of its strategic location. The British cultivated relations with Turkey after WWI to try and bring the new country into its sphere, so that in any future conflicts they wouldn't be aligned against Britain like they were in WWI. By WWII, Turkey had developed an anti-Axis neutrality that the Western powers found useful, eventually entering the war on the Allied side near the end. Basically Western powers were actively courting these positive strategic relationships with Turkey when these genocides were occurring.
* Morality of the Time / Forced Population Transfers - The morality of these topics was viewed a lot differently after the horrors of WWII than before. After WWI there was a broad acceptance even among most in the West that, in most places in this world, multiethnic states were a "nonstarter" likely to lead to serious problems. The idea was that while a State could tolerate a small ethnic minority, the dominant ethnicity would need to have enough of a majority that it never felt threatened, or the country would be prone to instability and other problems. For this reason, what are basically "forced population transfers" happened as the world's maps were redrawn between WWI and WWII. Many of these transfers were either implicitly or explicitly accepted by the West. 1922's "Forced Population Transfer" becomes 1950s "genocide." The issue gets really complex, in theory and in a bureaucrats mind, a "forced population transfer" is just you peacefully moving and living in a new place with people like you, right? That is the pie in the sky dream. The reality is people being forced to move, often do not want to--because they have to give up properties and homes that may have been in their family for generations. They were often not provided sufficient assistance to be able to relocate to a new home with the same standard of living. When the countries involved felt peoples weren't moving fast enough or in great enough numbers, violence and pogroms broke out. Forced expulsions, famines etc happened and many died. Part of the reason we don't view forced population transfers as an appropriate geopolitical option is the lessons of these events are that there is not really a way to do them "clean", they almost always devolve into genocidal behaviors.
* Despite all the problems mentioned above, with many of the things that happened in early Turkey, the international community viewed the ultimate outcome as "okay", because people were "sorted" into the right place. Anatolian Greeks ended up living in Greece, Armenians in Armenia etc. The great powers, even when admitting this happened in a dirty way, rationalized it as "well, Greece is where Greek peoples belong anyway." They also ignored things--like part of the population transfer agreements between Greece and Turkey stipulated the historical and large Greek population of Constantinople / Istanbul would not have to move, and would be protected. This did not occur, instead there were violent pogroms that basically forced them out, what had been a city with a very large Greek population for centuries quickly became one where the Greek community numbered only a few thousand. Again, because these "unfortunate incidents" would require hard strategic pain for the great powers, they were largely tacitly accepted with minimal dispute.
* Sympathy for Turkey - the Ottoman Empire lost a massive amount of land, and also saw Turks driven out of those lands into Anatolia during this time as well, so for great powers already inclined to ignore Turkish misbehavior, this helped their narrative "well, the Turks lost a lot of land and people too."
Well, our view of these types of forced population transfers is shaped largely by the India-Pakistan experience where the scale was staggering so the violence was 'noticed' in a way it hadn't been before. Then the wars related to the dissolution of Yugoslavia finally gave this a name 'ethnic-cleansing' that we can reddily identify it with.
Yeah but Armenians didn’t end up living in Armenia, they were deported to the Syrian desert and the sea
The Armenian genocide was not a population transfer
Which it absolutely should. The fall of the Ottoman Empire has essentially shaped the modern geopolitics of the Caucuses, the Levant, almost all the Eastern Medditerranean and the Balkans.
It comes up frequently when discussing the possibility of Turkey joining the EU. France, Greece and a few other countries have asked that formal recognition of the genocide be a condition of their accession although as of yet that hasn't been formally agreed as one of the requirements to them joining the EU.
Tell about history and real justice. I realize a few losers in large scale armed conflicts have faced some formal prosecutions, but if we tried to even the score for history, well, the USA ceded back to the surviving indigenous for one.
Letting them join the EU would be such a bad decision. They may live in the neighborhood, but their culture is decidedly different than European culture. Not to say their culture is inherently inferior, but is inherently *different.* It was that way before Erdogan. Now that he has regressed them to authoritarianism (again), and with his success in murdering and imprisoning so many that would oppose him, nothing about Turkey looks to have Europeanism on their horizon.
1) Turkey doesn't have a monolithic culture. Have you seen the meme going around about Europeans telling Turkish people that they don't like or act like Turks? That happens to everybody I know. Truth of the matter is "Westeren Secular Turks" who live in the Agean coast and Marmara Region (Istanbul and European Turkey) can be swapped with any citizen of southern Europe or balkans and you won't know the difference whether it's looks, politics or culture. Now, that's 40 per cent of the population. More if you only count Turks and not Kurds, Arabs, Georgians, etc.
Any criteria to meaningfully decouple Turks from westeren culture just doesn't work.
Pinnacle of the West... Separation of Church and State? Historically, Turkey would rank above countries like Ireland, Poland, Greece, and the USA if you count it.
Women and LGBTQ Rights? Abortion was legal way before many other countries. Voting, divorce, etc, before many. Women PM (most powerful political office back then) in 1980s. Trans surgery and treatment have been provided by the state since forever. Biggest Women's and LGBTQ marches in the Westeren World period. Plus, never criminalised or punished homosexuality. Same sex schools were never a thing.
Democracy? Turkey was indeed rocky at best but still a functioning democracy after 1950s while many EU States were under fascist or red fascist regimes (think Soviet bloc, Franco, Romania, Tito, Russia).
Human Rights? Some of the rights specifically enshrined in the constitution that are not protected at the constitutional level at many EU countries:
- Free Healthcare and Education (Up to PhD level)
- Right to Unionise and Strike, Worker Protections
- Right to Housing (provided by State)
- Right to a Sustainable and Healthy Environment (green stuff basically)
Plus International Humanitary Law thrumps local laws.
Didn't mention free speech. This where Erdogan comes in if you can't tell. Many of these are under siege by current gov, whose wishes are currently denied by a supreme Court that they hand-picked. Even the right wing islamist agree that he went too for. It is just not factually true that Turkey was like this before Erdogan, hell even before 2014.
3) not getting into music literature etc. Just watch Mor ve Otesi's eurovision entry. Or Hadise or Sertap Erener.
So it's just.... weird to say Turkey is instinctively different than its neighbours. Kurds or Eastern Turks? Sure. But they are not the majority, nor were they driving forces of Turkish political, legally or cultural system until very recently. And that makes absolute sense when you consider Turks are turkified greeks that lived and breathed what we consider as the foundations of westeren society for 3000 years or more.
When a nation denies it's own history, it is hard to teach it to others.
Ask a Turk about the Armenian genocide and they'll punch you and call you a liar.
Yes, and the world basically lets them and never questions their legitimacy.
Saudi Arabia was founded on 200 years of bloody conquest, but no one ever questions their legitimacy either.
Iraq came into being via the same League of Nations/UN mandate system that created Pakistan, Bangladesh, Jordan, Israel, and others and after the Hashemite monarchy was overthrown became one of the most aggressive, corrupt and brutal regimes in history, but no one questions their legitimacy either.
Only one country in the world gets their legitimacy questioned regularly and has people who have never studied their history insisting and even demanding their version not be questioned, and it isn’t Turkey.
Taiwan didn’t declare independence, it is actually the Chinese republic prior to the CCP taking over.
Which begs the question, why is China considered legitimate and Israel isn’t?
Still waiting to hear why Israel isn’t legitimate and Red China is.
They’ve massacred millions of their own people and are genociding the Uyghurs and Tibetans right now and are working to colonize the Russian far east.
Why is all of that okay but people only get upset about Israel?
That's just not true. Armenian "Massacre" is infactually covered through high school, which is mandatory. You are talking to a state bot form if somebody says thousands of Armenians weren't systematically killed, cleansed, or "transported" by Ottomans.
The issue is that the same school instils a genocide denailism in generations by using tactics that is being used now in a country very close by...
(Armenian Genocide happened. Do not let anyone deny that. But also its essential to understand why Turks believes the way they do.)
1) Armenians attacked, raped and killed Turks. They wanted independence and were in talks with Russia. So... self defence?
2)It was Ottomans, not us. Even if it is us, Turk leaders were incompetent. They didn't want to kill 600.000k civilians, but it was war time, so...
3) whataboutims. What about Turkish genocides that happened in balkans just years before? 600.000k people? What about Russia? Why doesn't West care about these? Emotional manipulation of teenagers here is scarry.
It's 5 minutes to check and verify that no one of these hold true, but if you live in a huge echo chamber where only 17 percent speaks a second language, it's hard to break through.
It didn’t happen, it wasn’t even that bad, and the Armenians deserved it!
I literally saw on Twitter today Turkish nationalists saying that the Armenian genocide was self defense because Armenians were killing all the Turks
I’m not very knowledgeable about history in that part of the world, but I certainly understand the frustration with hypocrisy like this.
From what I did learn, I get the impression that Turkish nationalism is strong in Turkey. This inevitably leads people to obscure past atrocities or really anything that doesn’t glorify the nation. So it could just be that Turkish culture itself doesn’t publicise or discuss this kind of history sufficiently, meaning the rest of the world knows little about it as well. For example, Turkey has a [law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_301_(Turkish_Penal_Code)) where you can’t publicly insult the country, its “heroes” or its institutions.
> Turkish culture itself doesn’t publicise or discuss this kind of history sufficiently
It officially refuses to call what happened genocide [edit: I removed a false statement I made about the etymology of genocide]
Genocide wasn't coined until 1944, and it's international legal definition wasn't until the Genocide convention in 1948.
I agree it was one, but the term and definition were not made specifically because of what Turkey did.
It actually was.
Raphael Lemkin, a young Polish Jew, knew about the Armenian genocide and was troubled that there was no legal term to describe the destruction of an entire ethnic group, so he created the term.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/coining-a-word-and-championing-a-cause-the-story-of-raphael-lemkin
Oh, my mistake. I looked things have to try to figure out how I made this and I see what happened. The scholar who coined the term was interested in we now call genocide because of the actions of Turkey.
I try to remember that Turkey and its WWI allies went through humiliating territory losses, reparations, and internal upheaval after the war. I can’t be too surprised that they experienced nationalism, xenophobia, and genocidal acts like the Germans, Bulgaria, and other contemporaries.
But we should never let them get away with what they didn’t to non-Turkish ethnic groups, or what they’re continuing to do to the Kurds.
> remember that Turkey and its WWI allies went through humiliating territory losses, reparations, and internal upheaval after the war.
It actually began in 1914, when they invaded Russia and Iran early in the war.
Yeah, even as I typed the comment I thought about how the Ottoman Empire was losing provinces during the war, which contributed to the later rise in Turkish nationalism
A village sued a monastery in Turkey that dates back 300 years before the birth of Muhammed claiming it was built on a mosque and a Turkish court agreed with them. Its riddled with denial of the people they cleansed. International pressure made the government reverse the decision
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mor\_Gabriel\_Monastery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mor_Gabriel_Monastery)
This essentially happened across the former Ottoman empire to one degree or another. The Ottomans didn't really care what ethnicity or religion you were as long as you fell in line and paid your taxes, so to speak. So lots of different ethnic and religious communities ended up moving around and becoming neighbors. The conversion to individual nation-states was drawn-out and bloody, leading to things like the civil war in the Balkans and the current state of affairs in parts of the Middle East.
I don't like the way Turkey's history is handled, but I honestly feel that they just had the misfortune of doing all that shit after WWI, when communications were better and people pretended to care more. Only a few decades earlier, the US and many others were still engaged in mass slaughter of native populations. Not to mention things like boarding schools (basically re-education camps) and forced sterilizations that persisted well into the 20th century.
Honestly I’d consider what the US did vs what Turkey did as apples and oranges. Turks and Armenians lived relatively peacefully alongside each other for centuries, whereas there had always been a clash of cultures between European settlers and the native tribes. I read it as much more similar to the millennia of tensions between the steppe tribes and their settled neighbours.
While that's true, tensions between Turks and Armenians weren't exactly non-existent. The 1915 Armenian genocide didn't happen out of the blue. When The Great War kicked up in 1914, there was already suspicion among The Young Turks that Armenians were traitors, and would join the Allies to fight against the Turks if the war ended poorly. This suspicion wasn't exactly baseless, as the war went on, Armenians volunteered to join the Russians to fight the Turks in the Caucasus. This led to the government at the time to attempt to "remove" Armenian populations close to the front. It was an unfortunate event, death marches, death squads, full blown genocide I will admit. Not only a dislocation of a people, but also their systemic killing.
Though, I'm not sure if you could expect it to go any better with what resources the Turks had at the time. With high schoolers joining the fronts, soldiers dying from exposure due to a lack of supplies, and a grave lack of rations at the time meant that the well being of Armenians were undoubtedly not a priority.
Another great example is the following:
Turkey had very little stockpile of arms and ammunition to fight The Independence War (1919-1923). Britain (and to an extent, Russia) did indeed arm Armenian populations within Turkey with around 40,000 rifles and ammunition, for them to fight against Turks in Anatolia.
Just because Turks and Armenians have lived peacefully alongside one another doesn't mean the Ottoman Empire wasn't an empire. Armenians were ruled over. They had every right to fight against the Turks, and the Turks had every right to protect their internal security. It turned out weaponizing a minority within a war torn region doesn't end up well for anyone. The Independence War of Turkey had an Armenian front.
Hopefully this establishes some connections between your apples and oranges.
Exactly. Armenians were considered untrustworthy, because of religion and their desire for a new state. They were normal part of society. Not pristine natives living in nature.
Read up on the Trail of Tears. Totally assimilated Cherokee people in Georgia, living pretty much like the settlers and right alongside them. Summarily evicted and sent on a death march out West.
Or, if you want to get into issues around race relations, read about incidents connected to the Klan revival in the early 20th century. Like, for example, the Rosewood massacre. Totally independent black town on a rail line in rural Florida, self-sufficient from harvesting of pine tar for naval stores. A good 60 years' of relative post-civil-war chill. Wiped off the map in a matter of days.
There is almost always an element of fabricated ethnicity in any genocidal event, or at least a sudden revival of and emphasis on old tensions.
Not justifying US actions but they are in no way comparable to what the Turks did in scale or in barbarity. The Americans weren't out there crucifying people.
> If these horrific events, far worse than many other genocides, led to the creation of Turkey then why did so many countries flock to get great relations with Turkey and everything was pretty much forgotten about afterward? It doesn’t really sit right with me.
Maybe because Turkey wasn't exceptional in this.
The history of the creation of modern homogeneous nation states as a whole is full of genecides and ethnic cleansings, well into the 20th and 21th centuries.
Even focusing just on the Balkans and the Middle East there are plenty of examples.
Also, realpolitik often is more important than anything else and even genocides are used as political tools or ignored depending on the situation.
Turkey is also a NATO country, so Western countries don't call out them for their crimes as much as they do with Russia or China for example.
Even post WWII millions of ethnic Germans were expelled from non German nations.
The partition of India being another example. It's amazing how many people don't understand that nation states as we know it is really modern idea.
Yes, pretty much.
Forced assimilations, ethnic cleansings and full on genocides have been more the rule than the exception.
This doesn't justify anything, but singling out one country for that doesn't make much sense.
bro there’s actually so many obvious turkish people replying to my post that have had their comment deleted because they’ve just been cooked after straight up denying it
Yeah it’s a bit wild to hear those kinds of arguments. At least Americans, Germans, Australians, and even Canadians admit there was genocide and generally frown upon it these days. China still denies ever genociding anyone, ever, and they of course don’t do it today, just like the Turks aren’t actively trying to genocide the Kurds. They’re just fighting “extremists.”
Around 20% of Turkey’s population is Kurdish. The Turkish government has oppressed Kurds at every turn, don’t get me wrong, but calling it a genocide is just wrong.
Armenian genocide is real enough and should be recognized, it’s a big shame on Turkey’s part that it isn’t.
The greek population exchange is more complicated and again doesn’t fit the genocide narrative at all.
Also, not to compare but Western European powers are the worst perpetrators of genocidal violence in the history of the world due to the entire history of colonization, wiping out full indigenous populations all over the global south but of course white christians love their superiority complex. Winston Churchill alone is responsible for 3-5x lives lost due to intentional famines in North India but he’s commonly hailed as a hero of the west. Genocide is horrible but the biggest monsters of all time accusing others gets old fast.
Maybe it’s because I’m from Southern California and we have a lot of Armenians here, but it’s pretty well known here. People were marching in the streets in celebration when the US government officially recognized the Armenian genocide in 2021.
I’m encouraged by so many reasonable comments here. It’s great that people know what happened outside of the affected ethnicities. However, as a descendent of Cypriot and Asia Minor Greeks I’m deeply saddened that so many people just focus on the Armenians. My whole Asia Minor family was wiped out except for a few who made it to the West. Cyprus is still occupied and Turkey controls the North and pumps settlers in. Turkey continues with its genocidal intentions against indigenous Christians and Kurds to this day.
It's a sense of insecurity about their history.
Anatolia was not always "Turkey", it was the heartland of the Christian, mostly Greek-speaking Byzantine(Roman) Empire until the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 and the emergence of the Sultan of Rum and beyliks and was populated by Greeks and Armenians until the last century.
They cannot accept that the Ottoman Empire or Turks did not always exist in the area.
Turks today actively deny the genocides of Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians committed by Turks. They always point fingers at the Balkans to unrelated massacres of Turks and call it a genocide and claim that it negates the Armenian genocide.
Look at r/Turkophobia , they're delusional.
See this [thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1bpoted/comment/kwxnnf1/?context=8&depth=9)
Do you think they're scared of a reconquista or something? It's hard to understand a bull headed culture, having been raised in one which is suicidally self-critical that won't even raise many legitimate critiques of others.
I think they’re insecure about Turkish identity.
I mean, if your country’s history was just conquest and enslaving where every great thing about your culture was arguably the product of the people you conquered and enslaved, you’d be insecure, too.
I mean, we know this: conquest aside, I just described the South.
I think America in general behaves with this insecurity, the need to kill people to bring "democracy" to them ranks with Soviet Union levels of doublespeak. But it doesn't manifest with an inability to criticize itself, we have even made an industry of self-criticism so much that it probably just demoralizes people that nothing people want ever matters.
Siezed Armenian assets were auctioned off by the Young Turk's regime to aquire wealth and build their regime (similar to Nazis siezing and auctioning the assets of wealthy Jews).
Similarly, Ataturk rewrote Turkey's national history and rewrote many massacres of Armenians as legends of "Turks defending their culture" and reframed their history of progroms/genocides as purely retaliatory against Greeks/Armenians/Kurds who wanted to destroy Turkey. You can even see today- Turkey builds a genocide denial monument right in the Turkish/Armenian border to memorialize the victims of the "Turkish Genocide".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%C4%9Fd%C4%B1r_Genocide_Memorial_and_Museum
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudohistory
Turkish education and media is heavily biased and has heavily enforced these perceptions of Turkish history, even weaponizing [Article 301 in Turkey's Penal Code](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_301_(Turkish_Penal_Code)) against anyone who criticizes Ataturk's legacy or calls the Armenian Genocide what it was. After the assassination (and celebration of such among Turkish nationalist groups and police officers) of Hrant Dink, Article 301 was buried by the Turkish government. I guess having it so blatantly weidled against Turkish opposition is not a good look for a country that's been trying to get into the EU for decades.
I believe Turkish nationalists aren't under any illusions that any of this didnt happen, they were just successful so they don't have a problem with it. Acknowledging the Armenian Genocide would not only call their entire accepted national identity into question, it would force them to acknowledge
A. The Genocide happened, therefore Armenians have a legitimate claim to Western Armenia/Eastern Turkey (or reparations)
B. The country of Turkey was funded by assets siezed through the Genocide of millions, and although Ataturk technically defeated the Young Turks, he still benefitted from the land, wealth and elimination of the "Armenian problem"
C. A large population of Turkey has some Armenian/Greek/Kurdish/Assyrian blood due to a longstanding tradition of weaponised rape, forced marriages (of female Genocide survivors to Ottoman troops who perpetrated it), and blood taxes. DNA tests are illegal in Turkey for obvious reasons.
D. The genocidal ambitions of Turks did not end after the Armenian Genocide. Ataturk refers to the Genocide himself as a tragedy, but says it's all the Young Turk's fault. His administration quickly began doing similar things to Kurds, Assyrians and Yzetis, and now to Syrians in Afrin, and acknowledging the Armenian Genocide opens up criticism to all Turkey's genocidal actions in the 100 years since the atrocity that they've become known for.
On the flip side, the balkan wars before WW1 precipitated on a bit of a reconquista. Southeast Europe experienced religious and ethnic cleansing that sent many Turks and Muslims Europeans into the remaining Ottoman Empire by the victorious collective of Balkan states. Interesting because of Kemalist turkification, many of those European Muslims have heavily assimilated into the Turkish mainstream culture.
The Greeks followed this with a campaign into Anatolia with the idea to establish a revanchist state after WW1. As brutal and bloody as the Turkish and Greek population transfers were it unfortunately was probably for the best. Remaining Muslims Greeks and Turks will kicked out of Greece as happened to the Orthodox Greeks in Anatolia.
In terms of the Assyrians and Armenians, I have no desire to play genocide apologist, but these were populations that did in fact desire to structure their own states in the middle of WW1. Chief problem became that the Turks knew they were at the precipice, were paranoid, and acted incredibly brutally. I think it doesn’t get mentioned because there’s a lot of murky politics and ethnic tensions involved.
The post world war 2 west is obsessed with Jews and their specific fate, but doesn’t give a fuck about the vast majority of Asia and Africa. I’ve noticed this getting more extreme
It’s because we feel guilty about not doing more for Jews in the Holocaust or accepting Jewish refugees, so we helped create a a state that took land from Palestinians in order to create a refuge for Jews.
What matters is a preexisting propaganda narrative.
Most people don’t give a fuck about 100,000+ dead civilians in Ethiopia in 2021 because there is no clear good guy vs bad guy. We aren’t getting any info about who to support or not support. It doesn’t even matter whether America is involved. You could argue that the US funded someone who funded someone else who did a genocide. That’s every single war in the world though.
So the more you read and learn, the more you realize how similar most conflicts are (they’re all proxy wars) and how silly it is to pick and choose one conflict to seethe about
People just care more about issues and events closely related to them. The holocaust happened in the west and in western countries where it didn't happen, there is still guilt about not helping the Jewish victims enough as they could and should have.
Great point
When you really think about it, the Holocaust is probably the worst intentional, systematic thing to happen to a group of people in the span of a few years. I don’t think there’s ever been such a massive amount of death and suffering in such a short period of time, specially targeted at certain groups.
the MAJOR reason other nations are 'friends' with turkey is because it occupies and important geophysical position on the globe, both allowing land-based commerce to cross from europe into asia, and allows sea-based commerce (and naval military assets) to flow into and out of the black sea.
it is a relationship of convenience, not of friendship. and keeping turkey on 'our side' keeps them off of moscow's side.
Turkey was a useful geopolitical counterweight to the Soviet Union in the post-war period, and remains an important ally of US hegemony in the middle east and (at times) against Russia. Turkey is aware of its position and has been very successful in extracting concessions from its allies by playing them against other geopolitical blocs. That's basically the whole reason.
Albanian genocide was by the serbs after kicking the ottomans out.
But to answer your question, the thing is, the 20s and 30s, and just after ww2, there were many conflicts that resulted in ethnic cleansing all over central and eastern europe and the levant.
Nations were being built along ethnic lines after the major empires that mashed them together collapsed.
All this was overshadowed by the horror of the nazi death machine.
For instance, nobody ever talks about the millions of germans, hungarians, poles, baltics that were displaced and/or killed in the Post WW2 nation building. The USSR basically pushed Poland 500km west, forcing german families that lived there for centuries to exile or death.
Another instance, the Taiping Rebellion, the 3rd most deadly human conflict in history, with 30 million dead, is never talked about.
Some tragedies simply get overshadowed, suppressed, or just get ignored because the victims dont have the same media clout as others.
My grandfather was from the East part of the Empire. Irony being that there was no real solid Turkish ethnicity. It was basically Turkish speaking Muslims. Being Muslim would accelerate the level of assimilation. As an example, Bosnians are often called Turks by their neighbors.
In terms of Armenia, there were war crime tribunals in the period immediately after WWI when the existing government was attempting to curry favor with the French and English, showing they had turned a new leaf. So, the evidence was saved and there can really be no doubt about the extent and accuracy of the genocide charge as it pertains to Armenians at least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul\_trials\_of\_1919%E2%80%931920
Turks are excellent at playing the victim card. Any time someone mentions it, they get swarmed by Turks saying “It didn’t happen but they deserved it” or “Oh we were just defending poor Turkish people” Constantly
Turkey has diverted a lot of energy into denying the Armenian genocide in particular.
Cyprus is *still* politically divided by its differing ethnic populations (i.e. Turkish Cypriots versus Greek Cypriots).
In recent memory (1980s), Turkey criminalized speaking Kurdish.
Even over 100 years later, Turkey still invests millions of dollars a year into combatting international recognition of the Armenian genocide.
It’s ridiculous how the population of Cyprus was 78% Greek and 18% Turkish before the invasion, and Turkey invaded and destroyed half the country and put settlers in.
The Western powers had a plan to divide up \[edit: modern\] Turkey into parts of Greece and independent Armenia as well as French, British and Italian(!) occupation zones. This neither justifies the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian genocides, nor was it the origin of the violence (there were serious massacres of Armenians going back more than 50 years). But when the Turks rallied and created "conditions on the ground" by wiping out other ethnic groups, the European Great Powers kinda shrugged and said, our bad. United States President Wilson cared a lot more, but he had a stroke (unrelated).
Because all the countries in the Americas were founded on bloody genocide, the borders of Europe were formed from millennia of wars and bloodshed, African countries *still* struggle with millennia old tribal divisions, and Asian countries’ borders are the result of bloody conquest.
There is no country that formed peacefully.
Don't forget their genocide of lebanon!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great\_Famine\_of\_Mount\_Lebanon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_Mount_Lebanon)
If a country conquests, ok, I get it. If a country pushes groups to reservations or other lands, ok, I get it. But intentionally murdering and starving people to death? That goes too far. I mean, look at the Eskimos. They lost ALL the conquering wars, but they still get to live in a snowy wasteland. Nobody genocided their asses.
Same thing is happening with the Pygmys of africa today. They are pretty much getting genocided.
Honorable mention to the Kurds, the group Turkey tried and failed to genocide.
On a side note, let's not idealize those who got conquered, either. Eskimo tribes fought with each other, and the per capita death rates could be catastrophic. The account I recall went something like "we raided their village. The men were all out fishing, so we killed all the women and children."
To deny that "primitive" tribes can be just as horrible as "advanced" civilizations is to deny them their full humanity.
>I mean, look at the Eskimos. They lost ALL the conquering wars, but they still get to live in a snowy wasteland. Nobody genocided their asses.
Probably just because they lived in a snowy wasteland nobody else really wanted to settle...
What exactly do you expect other countries to do regarding this fact?
You can't force them to recognize their past, they have to do it on their own. The historical facts and all three genocides are fairly well known outside Turkey, which supresses the knowledge about them (in fact, the genocides suffered by Muslims in the Balkans prior to 1914, as the Ottoman Empire was collapsing, are much, much more obscure in the West). There is a ton of historical research done on the topic outside Turkey, and numerous countries have oficially recognized Armenian genocide. Here in Poland those genocides are fairly well known and Turkish approach is disliked.
But what more can you do? Put economic sanctions on Turkey until they change stuff? Sanctions have low effectiveness in general - very often they are even counterproductive, sparking hostility, resistance and resilience. What do you expect, for the whole world to break diplomatic relations with Turkey? There is a long list of countries which can benefit from the cooperation with them, for their own safety and wellbeing of their citizens, and hostility in this regard wouldn't have changed anything anyway.
And why end on Turkey? Maybe the world should end diplomatic relations with Japan, with its Nazi tier of ww2 crimes and pretty bad record of admitting to them; and with China, for all terrible stuff PRC has done; and with India and Pakistan for their own two-way massacres; and with Indonesia with its own genocidal massacres; and with half of American states for their treatment of indigenous peoples; and with Serbia, and Russia, and European colonial powers (UK, France, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Netherlands), and half of Arab states, and plenty of African states... There is a long list of countries which have committed mass killings in the past 100 years. And then you have countries which collaborated with Nazis during Holocaust (a lot of them), and allies of all those regimes, and Scandinavian sterilisation of Sami natives...
The majority of big nations have blood on their hands. Alas, the world must go on, as it cannot wait for the process of coming to terms and taking responsibility for given collective's past crimes. Ultimately only the perpetrator can come to the admission of guilt, it cannot be forced from the outside.
> with half of American states for their treatment of indigenous peoples;
Which half of American states isn't built on land appropriated from indigenous people?
Because although the Ottomans were defeated, Turkey under Kemalist forces won its subsequent "war of independence" and succeeded in revising their WW1 peace treaty (Lausanne). All the war criminals taken to Malta by the British were returned to Turkey, all the land meant for Greece and Armenia was reverted. Then Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s pursued ultranationalism and promoted their own historiographical account. It would be as if Germany revolted after WW2 and a pro-Nazi government took power. Would Germans today deny the Holocaust? Very likely, because that is what they would be taught. The evidence would be overwhelming, so they would probably blame the jews. Much like most turks don't "deny" it ever happened and the dead, but just turn to blaming the armenians for instigating it.
It [hasn't been forgotten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide_recognition), but all the other genocides crowd for attention, including the several going on now.
Turkey stronk 🇹🇷🇹🇷💪💪💪
Fr tho Ottoman Empire was horrific for like the entirety of its existence so can you expect anything better from its successor state
The way history goes, if the perpetrators are not held accountable soon after their crimes against humanity, then they are never held accountable. In the 20th century, Germany, the USSR, China, Turkey, and Cambodia all committed hellish genocides. Germany’s is the only one you’ll hear about with any regularity or detail, because the perpetrators (who did not escape capture) were put on trial and sentenced. Their country was annihilated and occupied for 50 years. The other countries never had to face the world about their horrors, so people consider those events less important. I couldn’t tell you why this is the case, but it may either be a psychological thing or simply that we have significantly more information about the Holocaust due to the fact that it was interrupted in progress, whereas the others were largely driven to completion
Like most strife in eastern europe / south asia / middle east / northern africa, the answer is "Oil" and/or, secondarily and often just a scapegoat, "Religion", often enabled by strong-man-rule supported by whoever wanted the oil.
They’ve got good PR, I guess, or the west so desperately wanted a secular Muslim state (when the Ottoman Empire collapsed), that they were willing to overlook some peccadillos.
Because they were successful. If Israel just genocided the palestinians way back when then it wouldnt be facing the issue it is facing today. When conquering a place and the people wouldnt cooperate, it is better to massacre everyone instead of being “merciful” and letting them live in internement camps.
Ethnic cleansing of this nature was fairly normal until the end of WWII, after which all the Allies agreed to ethnically cleanse Germans from all the places that wouldn't be "Germany" especially the eastern half of Prussia.
So, when this was happening, at the twilght hight of European imperialism, it was a general shrug.
(edit) Also, policially, militarily, and economically, Turkey is the most important country in the Eastern Mediteranean.
When you continue to see the people you caused a genocide to, as not humans. You fail to realize you’ve committed genocide. That’s really the only answer.
It gets brought up quite a bit.
The genocides people talk about a lot are just outliers:
* The Holocaust was a part and purpose of a massive war that profoundly shaped the modern world and really set in motion the idea that people without direct connections should care about this stuff.
* Rwanda was important to shaping how the international community thinks about humanitarian intervention because it sees that as a failure of the system.
* The Balkan genocides were important in shaping how the IC and Europe particularly think about humanitarian intervention because it was a failure that made good in the end.
Those are the ones you’ll see talked about the most and it’s because there are important things to say about their role in shaping international law, diplomacy, and so on. The various genocides Turkey committed, while terrible, just weren’t an important part of the conversation about how to build and deploy the international system, so there’s not much to build upon as a conversation element.
There is an implicit assumption that all countries are founded on genocide so as long as they don't seem to be indicating they are going to repeat that any time soon most are willing to let it slide.
You can't exactly found a country twice so foundational genocides aren't really in danger of being repeated. Basically the genocides were successful enough that they are no longer relevant. It will only ever be unsuccessful genocides which people know about because the point of a genocide is to get rid of anyone who might care about it.
Not an answer to this question, but I offer as relevant. According to Eugen Rogan's book, Fall of the Ottomans, around 1920 reports of the massacres of Armenians during the First World War openly appeared in the Turkish press and officials held responsible put on trial.
At that point, Turkey was still on its knees following defeat in World War I, loss of its Empire and internal political disruption due to these events. The then rulers of Turkey feared their country being punished by the Allied Powers. Initially their strategy to deal with this was to blame individuals in the Ottoman government in hope of deflecting blame away from the Turkish nation as a whole.
Subsequently, when under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's secular nationalist government Turkey reasserted itself militarily and regained confidence, the strategy changed to outright denial.
Because if you go far back enough, most states are. In Europe you have nationalism and the birth of the nationstate idea that largely shaped the modern borders. In Asia, you have these monolithic, homogeneous countries like China and Japan. Do you really think all that land has always been that culture? In the middle east, the borders have been shaped by Arab and Turkish conquests and genocide almost as much as European imperialism and colonialism. And do I really need to talk about the colonial world?
> Greek genocide
One should note that this occurred at the time when Greece was attempting a war of conquest against turkey, and marching around Turkey burning cities.
The result of this was the mutual ethnic cleansing of the Greeks in turkey but also the Turks in Greece.
What do you mean by “talked about?” It is part of a historical record. Anyone can find information on what occurred and who was instrumental in making it happen. But, no one who was involved at the time is alive today. What exactly are you proposing?
History is full of genocides. It's actually pretty hard to keep track of them all. As for why it's not talked about, it would be the same reasons Americans don't talk about the Native American genocide. Half of them aren't even taught it happened, or at least not that it happened as a genocide. I would imagine it's the same in Turkey, they aren't gonna teach them that because they didn't lose like Germany did, they aren't forced to confront their past, and when they are, its most likely seen as a threat/political/unpatriotic, etc. This is how it is in the US at least.
The Americans are guilty of genocide during the Korean and Vietnamese wars as well, on account of their horrific bombing campaigns that had inflicting maximum civilian casualties as their stated mission objectives. The targeting of farmland to induce starvation, using chemical weapons, indiscriminate "saturation" bombing of urban areas as a weekly, if not daily mission, declaring a village a "free fire zone" and then loading up some hueys and searching for bodies. If that's not a genocide, I don't know what is.
Pick a definition and apply it without bias and you would be shocked.
Why is the American genocide of Native Americans constantly talked about? Because America is the world hegemon. Countries that are smaller regional powers do not have their past dug up nearly as much (usually).
This post was automatically removed due to an unusually high number of reports.
Turkey still actively goes out of its way to suppress this knowledge. They even threaten some sort of retribution on the world stage if you call it genocide. Sanctions, severing diplomatic ties, etc
And Turkey gave [large amounts](https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2023/04/princeton-armenian-genocide-education-honesty-trauma-curriculum) of money to Princeton University to deny the genocide. Justin McCathy was [fired](https://www.reddit.com/r/byebyejob/comments/xp5dxg/lowlife_armenian_genocide_denying_history/) from the University of Louisville for his genocide denial, including several books claiming that the genocide did not happen.
TY, I had trouble recalling specific events. I do remember seeing a website taken down by hackers for supposedly insulting Turkey. They even make Japan's ignoring WW2 war crimes look like they are shouting from the rooftops.
There’s lots more ofc, the assassination of Hrant Dink, blowing up medieval Armenian monasteries and churches, the way that archaeological and historic sites are destroyed by looters and the government does nothing (look up Ermeni hazeni on YouTube) See https://armenianweekly.com/2020/07/09/hunters-of-armenian-treasures/
There was another really small minority group, I forget who. iirc their name started with D
The Druze in Lebanon?
Turkey is definitely worse than Japan when it comes to denying it's past war crimes. Japan kinda just doesn't teach it in their schools but won't actively threaten, bribe, or take any other action against other countries for saying that Japan commited such terrible crimes in WWII.
Japan doesn't even refuse to teach it in schools. Don't know where that meme came from, but it's not true. There are some private schools with private curriculum who teach their own stuff, but public schools do go over the war. They are rather dry and straightforward, but that's all you can expect from public school anyways.
I've always regretted asking my Japanese roommates in college what they teach about WW2 in schools.
Why?
Iris Chang talked to way too many Japanese vets that participated in the Rape of Nanking and weren't ashamed about it. Only like one or two were.
['Comfort woman' statue pulled from Japan exhibit after threats](https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1UT0DF/)
Turkey actively goes out of its way to keep cleansing it's neighborhood
To add to this turkey also controls a strategically vital strait controlling access to the Black Sea. So politically it’s difficult to even broach the subject since turkey regularly threatens to take the political equivalent of the nuclear option when the subject is so much as mentioned.
Recently watched a vice documentary on YouTube, showing the news coverage (or lack there of) of the protests in gezi, and how the local channels were showing animal documentaries instead to hide what was going on. It’s interesting and important histories. It’s the systems in place
My public school board in canada was threatened by the Turkish embassy for introducing a high school elective course on genocides that mentions the Armenian genocide.
Turkey actively goes out of its way to keep cleansing its neighborhood
Think of who was the victim of the genocides. Armenians and Greeks don't have a lot of focus anyway in news, media, etc especially when these genocides occured during WW1 and in the chaotic years after. A modern parallel to this is what's happening in the DRC with very little coverage. Plus Turkey is geostrategically important so no big players want to address that (see their current ethnic cleansing of Kurds being ignored by NATO)
Yup especially with the fact that Armenia is aligned with Russia so they're basically an enemy of the west today even though they don't really have any other choice
[удалено]
> Armenia is f'cked in the sense that its location it must depend on Russia--NATO cannot protect Armenia from the Turks and Turkey is in NATO anyway
For some reason people just don’t care about Armenians. I mean, I care — I followed the news about the displacement and donated money to the Armenia food bank— but the general reaction from others is a big fat “meh.” I’ll never understand why some people’s lives matter and others don’t. It’s so arbitrary.
Palestinians are so much more fashionable, and fashion is important in driving politics, especially on the left, unfortunately.
I’m afraid that in this case you’re probably right.
Considering they were the first official Christian nation on earth and even much of Christiandom sorta turns a blind eye. Odd. I fin Armenia fascinating and have always wanted to visit.
You should go, it’s probably got some interesting sites especially if you’re into early Christian history.
It’s not arbitrary, it’s because they are poor
People are getting pretty upset about Palestine and they ain’t exactly rich
That's just cover for Jew/Israel rage though. Syria ethnically cleansed so many more Muslims and in such horrific ways that the photographs are being used to demonize Israel instead. Nobody cared enough about those photographs when it was Sunni vs Shia.
Good point
What is the latest update on nagarno karabakh. Oct 7 and then this is completely forgotten
Basically the Armenian genocide isn't discussed too much because it was largely successful.
You're right, the victims of the genocides have so little focus that you completely forgot to mention the Assyrians
A few reasons: * Geopolitics - Turkey was and remains a very important country in terms of its strategic location. The British cultivated relations with Turkey after WWI to try and bring the new country into its sphere, so that in any future conflicts they wouldn't be aligned against Britain like they were in WWI. By WWII, Turkey had developed an anti-Axis neutrality that the Western powers found useful, eventually entering the war on the Allied side near the end. Basically Western powers were actively courting these positive strategic relationships with Turkey when these genocides were occurring. * Morality of the Time / Forced Population Transfers - The morality of these topics was viewed a lot differently after the horrors of WWII than before. After WWI there was a broad acceptance even among most in the West that, in most places in this world, multiethnic states were a "nonstarter" likely to lead to serious problems. The idea was that while a State could tolerate a small ethnic minority, the dominant ethnicity would need to have enough of a majority that it never felt threatened, or the country would be prone to instability and other problems. For this reason, what are basically "forced population transfers" happened as the world's maps were redrawn between WWI and WWII. Many of these transfers were either implicitly or explicitly accepted by the West. 1922's "Forced Population Transfer" becomes 1950s "genocide." The issue gets really complex, in theory and in a bureaucrats mind, a "forced population transfer" is just you peacefully moving and living in a new place with people like you, right? That is the pie in the sky dream. The reality is people being forced to move, often do not want to--because they have to give up properties and homes that may have been in their family for generations. They were often not provided sufficient assistance to be able to relocate to a new home with the same standard of living. When the countries involved felt peoples weren't moving fast enough or in great enough numbers, violence and pogroms broke out. Forced expulsions, famines etc happened and many died. Part of the reason we don't view forced population transfers as an appropriate geopolitical option is the lessons of these events are that there is not really a way to do them "clean", they almost always devolve into genocidal behaviors. * Despite all the problems mentioned above, with many of the things that happened in early Turkey, the international community viewed the ultimate outcome as "okay", because people were "sorted" into the right place. Anatolian Greeks ended up living in Greece, Armenians in Armenia etc. The great powers, even when admitting this happened in a dirty way, rationalized it as "well, Greece is where Greek peoples belong anyway." They also ignored things--like part of the population transfer agreements between Greece and Turkey stipulated the historical and large Greek population of Constantinople / Istanbul would not have to move, and would be protected. This did not occur, instead there were violent pogroms that basically forced them out, what had been a city with a very large Greek population for centuries quickly became one where the Greek community numbered only a few thousand. Again, because these "unfortunate incidents" would require hard strategic pain for the great powers, they were largely tacitly accepted with minimal dispute. * Sympathy for Turkey - the Ottoman Empire lost a massive amount of land, and also saw Turks driven out of those lands into Anatolia during this time as well, so for great powers already inclined to ignore Turkish misbehavior, this helped their narrative "well, the Turks lost a lot of land and people too."
Well, our view of these types of forced population transfers is shaped largely by the India-Pakistan experience where the scale was staggering so the violence was 'noticed' in a way it hadn't been before. Then the wars related to the dissolution of Yugoslavia finally gave this a name 'ethnic-cleansing' that we can reddily identify it with.
Yeah but Armenians didn’t end up living in Armenia, they were deported to the Syrian desert and the sea The Armenian genocide was not a population transfer
The Armenian Genocide was a big deal in the US while it was happening, but over time it just got folded in "the horrors of war."
Honestly, the US does not teach how the fall of the Ottoman Empire currently affects geopolitics in general.
Which it absolutely should. The fall of the Ottoman Empire has essentially shaped the modern geopolitics of the Caucuses, the Levant, almost all the Eastern Medditerranean and the Balkans.
It comes up frequently when discussing the possibility of Turkey joining the EU. France, Greece and a few other countries have asked that formal recognition of the genocide be a condition of their accession although as of yet that hasn't been formally agreed as one of the requirements to them joining the EU.
they probably will agree to this but only once its too far back in history for any real justice
Tell about history and real justice. I realize a few losers in large scale armed conflicts have faced some formal prosecutions, but if we tried to even the score for history, well, the USA ceded back to the surviving indigenous for one.
Letting them join the EU would be such a bad decision. They may live in the neighborhood, but their culture is decidedly different than European culture. Not to say their culture is inherently inferior, but is inherently *different.* It was that way before Erdogan. Now that he has regressed them to authoritarianism (again), and with his success in murdering and imprisoning so many that would oppose him, nothing about Turkey looks to have Europeanism on their horizon.
1) Turkey doesn't have a monolithic culture. Have you seen the meme going around about Europeans telling Turkish people that they don't like or act like Turks? That happens to everybody I know. Truth of the matter is "Westeren Secular Turks" who live in the Agean coast and Marmara Region (Istanbul and European Turkey) can be swapped with any citizen of southern Europe or balkans and you won't know the difference whether it's looks, politics or culture. Now, that's 40 per cent of the population. More if you only count Turks and not Kurds, Arabs, Georgians, etc. Any criteria to meaningfully decouple Turks from westeren culture just doesn't work. Pinnacle of the West... Separation of Church and State? Historically, Turkey would rank above countries like Ireland, Poland, Greece, and the USA if you count it. Women and LGBTQ Rights? Abortion was legal way before many other countries. Voting, divorce, etc, before many. Women PM (most powerful political office back then) in 1980s. Trans surgery and treatment have been provided by the state since forever. Biggest Women's and LGBTQ marches in the Westeren World period. Plus, never criminalised or punished homosexuality. Same sex schools were never a thing. Democracy? Turkey was indeed rocky at best but still a functioning democracy after 1950s while many EU States were under fascist or red fascist regimes (think Soviet bloc, Franco, Romania, Tito, Russia). Human Rights? Some of the rights specifically enshrined in the constitution that are not protected at the constitutional level at many EU countries: - Free Healthcare and Education (Up to PhD level) - Right to Unionise and Strike, Worker Protections - Right to Housing (provided by State) - Right to a Sustainable and Healthy Environment (green stuff basically) Plus International Humanitary Law thrumps local laws. Didn't mention free speech. This where Erdogan comes in if you can't tell. Many of these are under siege by current gov, whose wishes are currently denied by a supreme Court that they hand-picked. Even the right wing islamist agree that he went too for. It is just not factually true that Turkey was like this before Erdogan, hell even before 2014. 3) not getting into music literature etc. Just watch Mor ve Otesi's eurovision entry. Or Hadise or Sertap Erener. So it's just.... weird to say Turkey is instinctively different than its neighbours. Kurds or Eastern Turks? Sure. But they are not the majority, nor were they driving forces of Turkish political, legally or cultural system until very recently. And that makes absolute sense when you consider Turks are turkified greeks that lived and breathed what we consider as the foundations of westeren society for 3000 years or more.
When a nation denies it's own history, it is hard to teach it to others. Ask a Turk about the Armenian genocide and they'll punch you and call you a liar.
As someone who’s been to Turkey several times, nobody denied it among the urban progressives I hung out with
French philosopher Ernest Renan said ‘A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours’
Yes, and the world basically lets them and never questions their legitimacy. Saudi Arabia was founded on 200 years of bloody conquest, but no one ever questions their legitimacy either. Iraq came into being via the same League of Nations/UN mandate system that created Pakistan, Bangladesh, Jordan, Israel, and others and after the Hashemite monarchy was overthrown became one of the most aggressive, corrupt and brutal regimes in history, but no one questions their legitimacy either. Only one country in the world gets their legitimacy questioned regularly and has people who have never studied their history insisting and even demanding their version not be questioned, and it isn’t Turkey.
what country are you referring to?
He’s referring to Israel (check his post history)
My guess is they're referring to either Israel or Palestine.
This is precisely why the excessive Western guilt and self-flagellation so in vogue right now is so dangerous.
Only one? I think you might want to reconsider that statement. What about Taiwan, for instance?
Taiwan didn’t declare independence, it is actually the Chinese republic prior to the CCP taking over. Which begs the question, why is China considered legitimate and Israel isn’t?
Oh come on, those are not comparable. By that logic any country that has ever had a civil war/revolution is illegitimate.
Exactly my point.
So it doesn’t beg the question at all.
Still waiting to hear why Israel isn’t legitimate and Red China is. They’ve massacred millions of their own people and are genociding the Uyghurs and Tibetans right now and are working to colonize the Russian far east. Why is all of that okay but people only get upset about Israel?
That's just not true. Armenian "Massacre" is infactually covered through high school, which is mandatory. You are talking to a state bot form if somebody says thousands of Armenians weren't systematically killed, cleansed, or "transported" by Ottomans. The issue is that the same school instils a genocide denailism in generations by using tactics that is being used now in a country very close by... (Armenian Genocide happened. Do not let anyone deny that. But also its essential to understand why Turks believes the way they do.) 1) Armenians attacked, raped and killed Turks. They wanted independence and were in talks with Russia. So... self defence? 2)It was Ottomans, not us. Even if it is us, Turk leaders were incompetent. They didn't want to kill 600.000k civilians, but it was war time, so... 3) whataboutims. What about Turkish genocides that happened in balkans just years before? 600.000k people? What about Russia? Why doesn't West care about these? Emotional manipulation of teenagers here is scarry. It's 5 minutes to check and verify that no one of these hold true, but if you live in a huge echo chamber where only 17 percent speaks a second language, it's hard to break through.
In part because Turkey pretends that it didn't happen. And also, even though it didn't happen, that it wasn't that bad.
It didn’t happen, it wasn’t even that bad, and the Armenians deserved it! I literally saw on Twitter today Turkish nationalists saying that the Armenian genocide was self defense because Armenians were killing all the Turks
I’m not very knowledgeable about history in that part of the world, but I certainly understand the frustration with hypocrisy like this. From what I did learn, I get the impression that Turkish nationalism is strong in Turkey. This inevitably leads people to obscure past atrocities or really anything that doesn’t glorify the nation. So it could just be that Turkish culture itself doesn’t publicise or discuss this kind of history sufficiently, meaning the rest of the world knows little about it as well. For example, Turkey has a [law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_301_(Turkish_Penal_Code)) where you can’t publicly insult the country, its “heroes” or its institutions.
> Turkish culture itself doesn’t publicise or discuss this kind of history sufficiently It officially refuses to call what happened genocide [edit: I removed a false statement I made about the etymology of genocide]
Genocide wasn't coined until 1944, and it's international legal definition wasn't until the Genocide convention in 1948. I agree it was one, but the term and definition were not made specifically because of what Turkey did.
It actually was. Raphael Lemkin, a young Polish Jew, knew about the Armenian genocide and was troubled that there was no legal term to describe the destruction of an entire ethnic group, so he created the term. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/coining-a-word-and-championing-a-cause-the-story-of-raphael-lemkin
Oh, my mistake. I looked things have to try to figure out how I made this and I see what happened. The scholar who coined the term was interested in we now call genocide because of the actions of Turkey.
I try to remember that Turkey and its WWI allies went through humiliating territory losses, reparations, and internal upheaval after the war. I can’t be too surprised that they experienced nationalism, xenophobia, and genocidal acts like the Germans, Bulgaria, and other contemporaries. But we should never let them get away with what they didn’t to non-Turkish ethnic groups, or what they’re continuing to do to the Kurds.
> remember that Turkey and its WWI allies went through humiliating territory losses, reparations, and internal upheaval after the war. It actually began in 1914, when they invaded Russia and Iran early in the war.
Yeah, even as I typed the comment I thought about how the Ottoman Empire was losing provinces during the war, which contributed to the later rise in Turkish nationalism
A village sued a monastery in Turkey that dates back 300 years before the birth of Muhammed claiming it was built on a mosque and a Turkish court agreed with them. Its riddled with denial of the people they cleansed. International pressure made the government reverse the decision [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mor\_Gabriel\_Monastery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mor_Gabriel_Monastery)
This essentially happened across the former Ottoman empire to one degree or another. The Ottomans didn't really care what ethnicity or religion you were as long as you fell in line and paid your taxes, so to speak. So lots of different ethnic and religious communities ended up moving around and becoming neighbors. The conversion to individual nation-states was drawn-out and bloody, leading to things like the civil war in the Balkans and the current state of affairs in parts of the Middle East. I don't like the way Turkey's history is handled, but I honestly feel that they just had the misfortune of doing all that shit after WWI, when communications were better and people pretended to care more. Only a few decades earlier, the US and many others were still engaged in mass slaughter of native populations. Not to mention things like boarding schools (basically re-education camps) and forced sterilizations that persisted well into the 20th century.
Honestly I’d consider what the US did vs what Turkey did as apples and oranges. Turks and Armenians lived relatively peacefully alongside each other for centuries, whereas there had always been a clash of cultures between European settlers and the native tribes. I read it as much more similar to the millennia of tensions between the steppe tribes and their settled neighbours.
While that's true, tensions between Turks and Armenians weren't exactly non-existent. The 1915 Armenian genocide didn't happen out of the blue. When The Great War kicked up in 1914, there was already suspicion among The Young Turks that Armenians were traitors, and would join the Allies to fight against the Turks if the war ended poorly. This suspicion wasn't exactly baseless, as the war went on, Armenians volunteered to join the Russians to fight the Turks in the Caucasus. This led to the government at the time to attempt to "remove" Armenian populations close to the front. It was an unfortunate event, death marches, death squads, full blown genocide I will admit. Not only a dislocation of a people, but also their systemic killing. Though, I'm not sure if you could expect it to go any better with what resources the Turks had at the time. With high schoolers joining the fronts, soldiers dying from exposure due to a lack of supplies, and a grave lack of rations at the time meant that the well being of Armenians were undoubtedly not a priority. Another great example is the following: Turkey had very little stockpile of arms and ammunition to fight The Independence War (1919-1923). Britain (and to an extent, Russia) did indeed arm Armenian populations within Turkey with around 40,000 rifles and ammunition, for them to fight against Turks in Anatolia. Just because Turks and Armenians have lived peacefully alongside one another doesn't mean the Ottoman Empire wasn't an empire. Armenians were ruled over. They had every right to fight against the Turks, and the Turks had every right to protect their internal security. It turned out weaponizing a minority within a war torn region doesn't end up well for anyone. The Independence War of Turkey had an Armenian front. Hopefully this establishes some connections between your apples and oranges.
Exactly. Armenians were considered untrustworthy, because of religion and their desire for a new state. They were normal part of society. Not pristine natives living in nature.
Read up on the Trail of Tears. Totally assimilated Cherokee people in Georgia, living pretty much like the settlers and right alongside them. Summarily evicted and sent on a death march out West. Or, if you want to get into issues around race relations, read about incidents connected to the Klan revival in the early 20th century. Like, for example, the Rosewood massacre. Totally independent black town on a rail line in rural Florida, self-sufficient from harvesting of pine tar for naval stores. A good 60 years' of relative post-civil-war chill. Wiped off the map in a matter of days. There is almost always an element of fabricated ethnicity in any genocidal event, or at least a sudden revival of and emphasis on old tensions.
The Ottomans also had an East African slave trade that is almost completely ignored, at least in the west.
Not justifying US actions but they are in no way comparable to what the Turks did in scale or in barbarity. The Americans weren't out there crucifying people.
> If these horrific events, far worse than many other genocides, led to the creation of Turkey then why did so many countries flock to get great relations with Turkey and everything was pretty much forgotten about afterward? It doesn’t really sit right with me. Maybe because Turkey wasn't exceptional in this. The history of the creation of modern homogeneous nation states as a whole is full of genecides and ethnic cleansings, well into the 20th and 21th centuries. Even focusing just on the Balkans and the Middle East there are plenty of examples. Also, realpolitik often is more important than anything else and even genocides are used as political tools or ignored depending on the situation. Turkey is also a NATO country, so Western countries don't call out them for their crimes as much as they do with Russia or China for example.
Even post WWII millions of ethnic Germans were expelled from non German nations. The partition of India being another example. It's amazing how many people don't understand that nation states as we know it is really modern idea.
Yes, pretty much. Forced assimilations, ethnic cleansings and full on genocides have been more the rule than the exception. This doesn't justify anything, but singling out one country for that doesn't make much sense.
What genocide? There was no genocide. It wasn’t even a relocation. But if there was one, they deserved it. /s if you couldn’t tell.
bro there’s actually so many obvious turkish people replying to my post that have had their comment deleted because they’ve just been cooked after straight up denying it
Yeah it’s a bit wild to hear those kinds of arguments. At least Americans, Germans, Australians, and even Canadians admit there was genocide and generally frown upon it these days. China still denies ever genociding anyone, ever, and they of course don’t do it today, just like the Turks aren’t actively trying to genocide the Kurds. They’re just fighting “extremists.”
Around 20% of Turkey’s population is Kurdish. The Turkish government has oppressed Kurds at every turn, don’t get me wrong, but calling it a genocide is just wrong. Armenian genocide is real enough and should be recognized, it’s a big shame on Turkey’s part that it isn’t. The greek population exchange is more complicated and again doesn’t fit the genocide narrative at all. Also, not to compare but Western European powers are the worst perpetrators of genocidal violence in the history of the world due to the entire history of colonization, wiping out full indigenous populations all over the global south but of course white christians love their superiority complex. Winston Churchill alone is responsible for 3-5x lives lost due to intentional famines in North India but he’s commonly hailed as a hero of the west. Genocide is horrible but the biggest monsters of all time accusing others gets old fast.
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The term ‘genocide’ was coined by Raphael Lemkin in response to the Armenian genocide.
Ive heard it discussed a lot, though usually in the context of Turkey trying to pretend it never happened. Horrible atrocity.
I wonder about this too. They’re still periodically killing Kurds and nobody seems bothered about it.
Maybe it’s because I’m from Southern California and we have a lot of Armenians here, but it’s pretty well known here. People were marching in the streets in celebration when the US government officially recognized the Armenian genocide in 2021.
They also kicked out their Jews…
I’m encouraged by so many reasonable comments here. It’s great that people know what happened outside of the affected ethnicities. However, as a descendent of Cypriot and Asia Minor Greeks I’m deeply saddened that so many people just focus on the Armenians. My whole Asia Minor family was wiped out except for a few who made it to the West. Cyprus is still occupied and Turkey controls the North and pumps settlers in. Turkey continues with its genocidal intentions against indigenous Christians and Kurds to this day.
It's a sense of insecurity about their history. Anatolia was not always "Turkey", it was the heartland of the Christian, mostly Greek-speaking Byzantine(Roman) Empire until the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 and the emergence of the Sultan of Rum and beyliks and was populated by Greeks and Armenians until the last century. They cannot accept that the Ottoman Empire or Turks did not always exist in the area. Turks today actively deny the genocides of Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians committed by Turks. They always point fingers at the Balkans to unrelated massacres of Turks and call it a genocide and claim that it negates the Armenian genocide. Look at r/Turkophobia , they're delusional. See this [thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1bpoted/comment/kwxnnf1/?context=8&depth=9)
Do you think they're scared of a reconquista or something? It's hard to understand a bull headed culture, having been raised in one which is suicidally self-critical that won't even raise many legitimate critiques of others.
I think they’re insecure about Turkish identity. I mean, if your country’s history was just conquest and enslaving where every great thing about your culture was arguably the product of the people you conquered and enslaved, you’d be insecure, too. I mean, we know this: conquest aside, I just described the South.
I think America in general behaves with this insecurity, the need to kill people to bring "democracy" to them ranks with Soviet Union levels of doublespeak. But it doesn't manifest with an inability to criticize itself, we have even made an industry of self-criticism so much that it probably just demoralizes people that nothing people want ever matters.
Siezed Armenian assets were auctioned off by the Young Turk's regime to aquire wealth and build their regime (similar to Nazis siezing and auctioning the assets of wealthy Jews). Similarly, Ataturk rewrote Turkey's national history and rewrote many massacres of Armenians as legends of "Turks defending their culture" and reframed their history of progroms/genocides as purely retaliatory against Greeks/Armenians/Kurds who wanted to destroy Turkey. You can even see today- Turkey builds a genocide denial monument right in the Turkish/Armenian border to memorialize the victims of the "Turkish Genocide". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%C4%9Fd%C4%B1r_Genocide_Memorial_and_Museum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudohistory Turkish education and media is heavily biased and has heavily enforced these perceptions of Turkish history, even weaponizing [Article 301 in Turkey's Penal Code](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_301_(Turkish_Penal_Code)) against anyone who criticizes Ataturk's legacy or calls the Armenian Genocide what it was. After the assassination (and celebration of such among Turkish nationalist groups and police officers) of Hrant Dink, Article 301 was buried by the Turkish government. I guess having it so blatantly weidled against Turkish opposition is not a good look for a country that's been trying to get into the EU for decades. I believe Turkish nationalists aren't under any illusions that any of this didnt happen, they were just successful so they don't have a problem with it. Acknowledging the Armenian Genocide would not only call their entire accepted national identity into question, it would force them to acknowledge A. The Genocide happened, therefore Armenians have a legitimate claim to Western Armenia/Eastern Turkey (or reparations) B. The country of Turkey was funded by assets siezed through the Genocide of millions, and although Ataturk technically defeated the Young Turks, he still benefitted from the land, wealth and elimination of the "Armenian problem" C. A large population of Turkey has some Armenian/Greek/Kurdish/Assyrian blood due to a longstanding tradition of weaponised rape, forced marriages (of female Genocide survivors to Ottoman troops who perpetrated it), and blood taxes. DNA tests are illegal in Turkey for obvious reasons. D. The genocidal ambitions of Turks did not end after the Armenian Genocide. Ataturk refers to the Genocide himself as a tragedy, but says it's all the Young Turk's fault. His administration quickly began doing similar things to Kurds, Assyrians and Yzetis, and now to Syrians in Afrin, and acknowledging the Armenian Genocide opens up criticism to all Turkey's genocidal actions in the 100 years since the atrocity that they've become known for.
On the flip side, the balkan wars before WW1 precipitated on a bit of a reconquista. Southeast Europe experienced religious and ethnic cleansing that sent many Turks and Muslims Europeans into the remaining Ottoman Empire by the victorious collective of Balkan states. Interesting because of Kemalist turkification, many of those European Muslims have heavily assimilated into the Turkish mainstream culture. The Greeks followed this with a campaign into Anatolia with the idea to establish a revanchist state after WW1. As brutal and bloody as the Turkish and Greek population transfers were it unfortunately was probably for the best. Remaining Muslims Greeks and Turks will kicked out of Greece as happened to the Orthodox Greeks in Anatolia. In terms of the Assyrians and Armenians, I have no desire to play genocide apologist, but these were populations that did in fact desire to structure their own states in the middle of WW1. Chief problem became that the Turks knew they were at the precipice, were paranoid, and acted incredibly brutally. I think it doesn’t get mentioned because there’s a lot of murky politics and ethnic tensions involved.
The killings of Greeks in Turkiye began in 1913, 7 years before the Greco-Turkish war which was from 1919-1922..
Because the west, or more specifically the anglophone and the Germanic world, don’t care about that fact. Simple as that
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The post world war 2 west is obsessed with Jews and their specific fate, but doesn’t give a fuck about the vast majority of Asia and Africa. I’ve noticed this getting more extreme
It’s because we feel guilty about not doing more for Jews in the Holocaust or accepting Jewish refugees, so we helped create a a state that took land from Palestinians in order to create a refuge for Jews.
Humans are flawed. One of our flaws is that we empathize more with people who look like us than people who don’t.
"Uyghur genocide? What Uyghurs genocide?" It's politically advantageous to Stand up or again Israel right now, not so much many other oppressed people
What matters is a preexisting propaganda narrative. Most people don’t give a fuck about 100,000+ dead civilians in Ethiopia in 2021 because there is no clear good guy vs bad guy. We aren’t getting any info about who to support or not support. It doesn’t even matter whether America is involved. You could argue that the US funded someone who funded someone else who did a genocide. That’s every single war in the world though. So the more you read and learn, the more you realize how similar most conflicts are (they’re all proxy wars) and how silly it is to pick and choose one conflict to seethe about
Yikes.
People just care more about issues and events closely related to them. The holocaust happened in the west and in western countries where it didn't happen, there is still guilt about not helping the Jewish victims enough as they could and should have.
Great point When you really think about it, the Holocaust is probably the worst intentional, systematic thing to happen to a group of people in the span of a few years. I don’t think there’s ever been such a massive amount of death and suffering in such a short period of time, specially targeted at certain groups.
Zionists\* not Jews.
the MAJOR reason other nations are 'friends' with turkey is because it occupies and important geophysical position on the globe, both allowing land-based commerce to cross from europe into asia, and allows sea-based commerce (and naval military assets) to flow into and out of the black sea. it is a relationship of convenience, not of friendship. and keeping turkey on 'our side' keeps them off of moscow's side.
Turkey was a useful geopolitical counterweight to the Soviet Union in the post-war period, and remains an important ally of US hegemony in the middle east and (at times) against Russia. Turkey is aware of its position and has been very successful in extracting concessions from its allies by playing them against other geopolitical blocs. That's basically the whole reason.
Albanian genocide was by the serbs after kicking the ottomans out. But to answer your question, the thing is, the 20s and 30s, and just after ww2, there were many conflicts that resulted in ethnic cleansing all over central and eastern europe and the levant. Nations were being built along ethnic lines after the major empires that mashed them together collapsed. All this was overshadowed by the horror of the nazi death machine. For instance, nobody ever talks about the millions of germans, hungarians, poles, baltics that were displaced and/or killed in the Post WW2 nation building. The USSR basically pushed Poland 500km west, forcing german families that lived there for centuries to exile or death. Another instance, the Taiping Rebellion, the 3rd most deadly human conflict in history, with 30 million dead, is never talked about. Some tragedies simply get overshadowed, suppressed, or just get ignored because the victims dont have the same media clout as others.
The Bosporus. No one would care about them or what they think nearly so much, but they control the Bosporus.
they’ve had some really successful centralized education providing for their own propoganda and practically qualifying modern turkish as a conlang
Because it’s not a war crime unless you lose.
My grandfather was from the East part of the Empire. Irony being that there was no real solid Turkish ethnicity. It was basically Turkish speaking Muslims. Being Muslim would accelerate the level of assimilation. As an example, Bosnians are often called Turks by their neighbors.
In terms of Armenia, there were war crime tribunals in the period immediately after WWI when the existing government was attempting to curry favor with the French and English, showing they had turned a new leaf. So, the evidence was saved and there can really be no doubt about the extent and accuracy of the genocide charge as it pertains to Armenians at least. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul\_trials\_of\_1919%E2%80%931920
Turks are excellent at playing the victim card. Any time someone mentions it, they get swarmed by Turks saying “It didn’t happen but they deserved it” or “Oh we were just defending poor Turkish people” Constantly
Turkey has diverted a lot of energy into denying the Armenian genocide in particular. Cyprus is *still* politically divided by its differing ethnic populations (i.e. Turkish Cypriots versus Greek Cypriots). In recent memory (1980s), Turkey criminalized speaking Kurdish. Even over 100 years later, Turkey still invests millions of dollars a year into combatting international recognition of the Armenian genocide.
It’s ridiculous how the population of Cyprus was 78% Greek and 18% Turkish before the invasion, and Turkey invaded and destroyed half the country and put settlers in.
speaking kurdish is free for the last 20 years
And segregation has been illegal in the US since the 60s, but that doesn’t mean that its legacy isn’t real.
Yes that is correct but my point was that for around a decade it wasn’t legal under a military government and that wasn’t so long ago.
The Western powers had a plan to divide up \[edit: modern\] Turkey into parts of Greece and independent Armenia as well as French, British and Italian(!) occupation zones. This neither justifies the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian genocides, nor was it the origin of the violence (there were serious massacres of Armenians going back more than 50 years). But when the Turks rallied and created "conditions on the ground" by wiping out other ethnic groups, the European Great Powers kinda shrugged and said, our bad. United States President Wilson cared a lot more, but he had a stroke (unrelated).
The Adana massacres and The Hamidian massacres were a dress rehearsal for the Armenian genocide.
Because all the countries in the Americas were founded on bloody genocide, the borders of Europe were formed from millennia of wars and bloodshed, African countries *still* struggle with millennia old tribal divisions, and Asian countries’ borders are the result of bloody conquest. There is no country that formed peacefully.
Don't forget their genocide of lebanon! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great\_Famine\_of\_Mount\_Lebanon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_Mount_Lebanon) If a country conquests, ok, I get it. If a country pushes groups to reservations or other lands, ok, I get it. But intentionally murdering and starving people to death? That goes too far. I mean, look at the Eskimos. They lost ALL the conquering wars, but they still get to live in a snowy wasteland. Nobody genocided their asses. Same thing is happening with the Pygmys of africa today. They are pretty much getting genocided. Honorable mention to the Kurds, the group Turkey tried and failed to genocide.
On a side note, let's not idealize those who got conquered, either. Eskimo tribes fought with each other, and the per capita death rates could be catastrophic. The account I recall went something like "we raided their village. The men were all out fishing, so we killed all the women and children." To deny that "primitive" tribes can be just as horrible as "advanced" civilizations is to deny them their full humanity.
Primitive tribes are a lot more violent. Why wouldn’t they be?
>I mean, look at the Eskimos. They lost ALL the conquering wars, but they still get to live in a snowy wasteland. Nobody genocided their asses. Probably just because they lived in a snowy wasteland nobody else really wanted to settle...
turkey is committing genocide against the Kurds as we speak and nobody in the world cares.
What exactly do you expect other countries to do regarding this fact? You can't force them to recognize their past, they have to do it on their own. The historical facts and all three genocides are fairly well known outside Turkey, which supresses the knowledge about them (in fact, the genocides suffered by Muslims in the Balkans prior to 1914, as the Ottoman Empire was collapsing, are much, much more obscure in the West). There is a ton of historical research done on the topic outside Turkey, and numerous countries have oficially recognized Armenian genocide. Here in Poland those genocides are fairly well known and Turkish approach is disliked. But what more can you do? Put economic sanctions on Turkey until they change stuff? Sanctions have low effectiveness in general - very often they are even counterproductive, sparking hostility, resistance and resilience. What do you expect, for the whole world to break diplomatic relations with Turkey? There is a long list of countries which can benefit from the cooperation with them, for their own safety and wellbeing of their citizens, and hostility in this regard wouldn't have changed anything anyway. And why end on Turkey? Maybe the world should end diplomatic relations with Japan, with its Nazi tier of ww2 crimes and pretty bad record of admitting to them; and with China, for all terrible stuff PRC has done; and with India and Pakistan for their own two-way massacres; and with Indonesia with its own genocidal massacres; and with half of American states for their treatment of indigenous peoples; and with Serbia, and Russia, and European colonial powers (UK, France, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Netherlands), and half of Arab states, and plenty of African states... There is a long list of countries which have committed mass killings in the past 100 years. And then you have countries which collaborated with Nazis during Holocaust (a lot of them), and allies of all those regimes, and Scandinavian sterilisation of Sami natives... The majority of big nations have blood on their hands. Alas, the world must go on, as it cannot wait for the process of coming to terms and taking responsibility for given collective's past crimes. Ultimately only the perpetrator can come to the admission of guilt, it cannot be forced from the outside.
> with half of American states for their treatment of indigenous peoples; Which half of American states isn't built on land appropriated from indigenous people?
Because although the Ottomans were defeated, Turkey under Kemalist forces won its subsequent "war of independence" and succeeded in revising their WW1 peace treaty (Lausanne). All the war criminals taken to Malta by the British were returned to Turkey, all the land meant for Greece and Armenia was reverted. Then Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s pursued ultranationalism and promoted their own historiographical account. It would be as if Germany revolted after WW2 and a pro-Nazi government took power. Would Germans today deny the Holocaust? Very likely, because that is what they would be taught. The evidence would be overwhelming, so they would probably blame the jews. Much like most turks don't "deny" it ever happened and the dead, but just turn to blaming the armenians for instigating it.
Geopolitics. They needed Turkey to block the USSR.
It [hasn't been forgotten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide_recognition), but all the other genocides crowd for attention, including the several going on now.
I mean Armenians and Greeks talk about this all the time- people just choose to ignore.
Turkey stronk 🇹🇷🇹🇷💪💪💪 Fr tho Ottoman Empire was horrific for like the entirety of its existence so can you expect anything better from its successor state
The way history goes, if the perpetrators are not held accountable soon after their crimes against humanity, then they are never held accountable. In the 20th century, Germany, the USSR, China, Turkey, and Cambodia all committed hellish genocides. Germany’s is the only one you’ll hear about with any regularity or detail, because the perpetrators (who did not escape capture) were put on trial and sentenced. Their country was annihilated and occupied for 50 years. The other countries never had to face the world about their horrors, so people consider those events less important. I couldn’t tell you why this is the case, but it may either be a psychological thing or simply that we have significantly more information about the Holocaust due to the fact that it was interrupted in progress, whereas the others were largely driven to completion
Like most strife in eastern europe / south asia / middle east / northern africa, the answer is "Oil" and/or, secondarily and often just a scapegoat, "Religion", often enabled by strong-man-rule supported by whoever wanted the oil.
And it wasn’t that long ago either that they wiped out millions of Armenians.
exactly my point
They’ve got good PR, I guess, or the west so desperately wanted a secular Muslim state (when the Ottoman Empire collapsed), that they were willing to overlook some peccadillos.
Because they were successful. If Israel just genocided the palestinians way back when then it wouldnt be facing the issue it is facing today. When conquering a place and the people wouldnt cooperate, it is better to massacre everyone instead of being “merciful” and letting them live in internement camps.
Because they denied it really, really hard, and if you do that long enough it just works.
Ethnic cleansing of this nature was fairly normal until the end of WWII, after which all the Allies agreed to ethnically cleanse Germans from all the places that wouldn't be "Germany" especially the eastern half of Prussia. So, when this was happening, at the twilght hight of European imperialism, it was a general shrug. (edit) Also, policially, militarily, and economically, Turkey is the most important country in the Eastern Mediteranean.
I mean all nations with almost no exceptions are based on genocide of one form or another. It all hinges on how well it was documented.
They literally invented the term “it didn’t happen but they deserved it”
French postmodernist: that’s a question whatever did means. Or happen means
western powers don’t really care about the crimes another country commits as long as it doesn’t affect their income
I know this will probably get so many downvotes because it’s quite a sensitive topic but it’s the truth nontheless.
History is full of this. Countries do shit to become countries.
Because using your argument literally every country is like that
When you continue to see the people you caused a genocide to, as not humans. You fail to realize you’ve committed genocide. That’s really the only answer.
The victims are Christian and the perpetrators are Muslim, and Turkey is like a NATO ally.
Hypocrisy and politics go hand in hand, plus admitting the massacred you have commited is a European thing, with some exceptions.
It gets brought up quite a bit. The genocides people talk about a lot are just outliers: * The Holocaust was a part and purpose of a massive war that profoundly shaped the modern world and really set in motion the idea that people without direct connections should care about this stuff. * Rwanda was important to shaping how the international community thinks about humanitarian intervention because it sees that as a failure of the system. * The Balkan genocides were important in shaping how the IC and Europe particularly think about humanitarian intervention because it was a failure that made good in the end. Those are the ones you’ll see talked about the most and it’s because there are important things to say about their role in shaping international law, diplomacy, and so on. The various genocides Turkey committed, while terrible, just weren’t an important part of the conversation about how to build and deploy the international system, so there’s not much to build upon as a conversation element.
There is an implicit assumption that all countries are founded on genocide so as long as they don't seem to be indicating they are going to repeat that any time soon most are willing to let it slide. You can't exactly found a country twice so foundational genocides aren't really in danger of being repeated. Basically the genocides were successful enough that they are no longer relevant. It will only ever be unsuccessful genocides which people know about because the point of a genocide is to get rid of anyone who might care about it.
Pls don't look up the original The Young Turks... Nothing to see here
Show me a country that isn't built on a pile of bones. Please. I'm looking to move.
Not an answer to this question, but I offer as relevant. According to Eugen Rogan's book, Fall of the Ottomans, around 1920 reports of the massacres of Armenians during the First World War openly appeared in the Turkish press and officials held responsible put on trial. At that point, Turkey was still on its knees following defeat in World War I, loss of its Empire and internal political disruption due to these events. The then rulers of Turkey feared their country being punished by the Allied Powers. Initially their strategy to deal with this was to blame individuals in the Ottoman government in hope of deflecting blame away from the Turkish nation as a whole. Subsequently, when under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's secular nationalist government Turkey reasserted itself militarily and regained confidence, the strategy changed to outright denial.
Because if you go far back enough, most states are. In Europe you have nationalism and the birth of the nationstate idea that largely shaped the modern borders. In Asia, you have these monolithic, homogeneous countries like China and Japan. Do you really think all that land has always been that culture? In the middle east, the borders have been shaped by Arab and Turkish conquests and genocide almost as much as European imperialism and colonialism. And do I really need to talk about the colonial world?
Turkey is geographically important as a bridge between Europe and Asia.
> Greek genocide One should note that this occurred at the time when Greece was attempting a war of conquest against turkey, and marching around Turkey burning cities. The result of this was the mutual ethnic cleansing of the Greeks in turkey but also the Turks in Greece.
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Why would I do that?
The killings of Greeks began in 1913/14. The Greco-Turkish war was from 1919-1922. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide
Because almost every country is built on genocide
This is a really good way of trivialising genocide.
that’s just entirely not true is it.
What do you mean by “talked about?” It is part of a historical record. Anyone can find information on what occurred and who was instrumental in making it happen. But, no one who was involved at the time is alive today. What exactly are you proposing?
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i meant in terms of countries choosing to ignore it, and Turkish education choosing to silence it
Because it's not governed by Jews.
> The republic of Turkey, founded in 1922 *1923
Most people don't care, they only care when it's either whites doing it or Jews. As it's the trend to hate those two groups.
Can’t criticize non European atrocities.
The victims don’t speak English.
History is full of genocides. It's actually pretty hard to keep track of them all. As for why it's not talked about, it would be the same reasons Americans don't talk about the Native American genocide. Half of them aren't even taught it happened, or at least not that it happened as a genocide. I would imagine it's the same in Turkey, they aren't gonna teach them that because they didn't lose like Germany did, they aren't forced to confront their past, and when they are, its most likely seen as a threat/political/unpatriotic, etc. This is how it is in the US at least. The Americans are guilty of genocide during the Korean and Vietnamese wars as well, on account of their horrific bombing campaigns that had inflicting maximum civilian casualties as their stated mission objectives. The targeting of farmland to induce starvation, using chemical weapons, indiscriminate "saturation" bombing of urban areas as a weekly, if not daily mission, declaring a village a "free fire zone" and then loading up some hueys and searching for bodies. If that's not a genocide, I don't know what is. Pick a definition and apply it without bias and you would be shocked.
It's taught in high school classes. I don't think anyone is hiding it
Why is the American genocide of Native Americans constantly talked about? Because America is the world hegemon. Countries that are smaller regional powers do not have their past dug up nearly as much (usually).
Because many countries are built on genocide.
Because they’re not Jews so people don’t care. That’s really the answer
To be fair is you asked people what the largest ethnic cleansing ever was I don’t think people would answer “Germans from EasternEurope”’