There’s a resolution in the U.S. House which would recognize the events as a genocide. It’s been tangled up in opposition which is essentially motivated by geopolitical concerns and the U.S. relationship to the Turkish government. Adam Schiff is behind it, and not surprisingly, his district includes Glendale, which has a very large Armenian population (that is, a large Western Armenian population, more of whom can vote. Fewer Eastern Armenians, who tend to live here in East Hollywood, or ‘Little Armenia,’ can vote, as they tend to be more recent immigrants. What’s the difference? Oh, don’t get me started…)
I had relatives that escaped the genocide and came to live in America. Turkey’s continual denials are definitely a sore point with me. Also frustrating is how close the U.S. has come to making an official resolution describing the massacre as genocide, only to be blocked by Turkey threatening to close off its airbases, which we need in our various actions against Middle Eastern targets.
However, I’ve spent a number of years in Viet Nam. While there, I spoke with an agency aiding agent orange victims, and I visited some of the affected families. As far as I can tell, the U.S. still officially denies that agent orange caused any of these problems, including problems reported by our own G.I.s. We demand the Vietnamese prove the connection through expensive blood tests on each affected individual … something simply beyond the means of most people there. So, Turkey isn’t the only country to be in official denial.
A Turkey Jerk…?
I would say the real question is what’s the deal with western politicians trying to do the job of historians.
ISTM the US will make resolutions for whatever it wants up to the point where saying something may impact our economic plans, morals be damned. When oil is in the equation there is always a new game board brought out.
Historians don’t exactly have the power to change laws, like making it not illegal to claim, in Turkey, that what they did was genocide
Look up Rwanda, 1994. And there are many similar stories from Bosnia, etc.
But the only party in Armenia that seriously demands those territories is the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, which is only a minor party in Parliament. And, is there any active movement among Turkish Armenians for secession-and-reunification? And aren’t all those territories Turkish-majority by now?
As for the Kurds (whose ancestors, some of them, participated enthusiastically in the Armenian Genocide, BTW) . . . they’re still a majority in SE Turkey, and it’s going to shake things up in Turkey every time things are shaken up in a neighboring country with a Kurdish minority. That happened with Iraq, and soon, what happens to/is achieved by Kurds in Syria will have effects washing over the border. (Iran and Iranian Kurdistan all stable, for now, AFAIK.)
I think those laws are quite odious, but when the French prosecute the world’s most respected scholar on the Ottoman Empire for giving his professional opinion on the subject in an interview with Le Monde and when they push for laws making it illegal to “deny” that it was a genocide, they don’t have a leg to stand on.
I think most French Ottomanists and other French Middle Eastern scholars are probably not all that happy about their government telling them what is the “proper” story and letting them know they’ll be prosecuted if they disagree with the official line and I suspect their Turkish counterparts feel the same.
I had never known about this until just a couple weeks ago, when I read the (fictional) story, “The Hidden Children,” by Robert W. Chambers. It’s sort of Fenimore Cooper for literate people, and goes into detail on the destruction of Iroquois villages and farms and croplands.
This is the sort of thing we should have been taught in school, alongside the good things George Washington did. But some people apparently feel that “balance” in education is unpatriotic.
Well, let’s see, the individual who coined the word “genocide” was was inspired by the events in Armenia. So why don’t we start from there? 
That was my point. There was an attempt to say the events were equivalent earlier and I think that is preposterous.
With all due respect, using wikipedia as your primary resource for information regarding a controversial historical event, particularly a controversial event from Middle Eastern history is extremely foolish.
The wikipedia page on the subject is an utter mess. You’ll notice that most of the sources and links aren’t scholars but activists. Moreover, the idea that 1.5 million Armenians died during it is preposterous and not supported even by any of the original propaganda reports. In reality, the actual figure is more likely around 600,000, which is obviously still too much.
In the several decades prior to the Armenian tragedy Europeans had rather rutheless been expelling Muslims with far greater brutality than the Ottomans would later show towards the Armenians and the Ottomans were understandably terrified at seeing their Empire being carved up and Muslims being put to the sword or expelled.
The Armenian tragedy occurred in the midst of WWI when the Ottomans were fighting to survive against the allied powers who were striving to rip them apart and followed a bloody revolt in which the Armenians were trying to claim as a state of their own a territory in which around 70% of the inhabitants were Muslims and they were engaged in wide scale ethnic cleansing/genocide to accomplish this.
Their revolt was crushed and the Ottomans decided to forcibly remove most of the Armenians from Eastern Anatolia, which while appalling was in the midst of a war for their survival. Most of the Armenians who died were not massacred, but died of starvation which wasn’t so much malice as incompetence, comparable to the way vast numbers of Afrikaners died in British concentration camps during the Boer War(something which is not called a genocide). Those who were murdered were, with rare exceptions, not massacred by Turks or Ottoman troops, but by Kurdish bands who wanted revenge for atrocities committed by Armenian terrorists/guerillas.
I know there’s a tremendous amount of disinformation to suggest that most Middle Eastern scholars consider this a genocide and agree with the standard Armenian version of events, but that is simply not true.
It’s also worth noting that around 100,000 Armenians living in Istanbul, in the very heart of the Ottoman Empire weren’t expelled, which makes the Armenian tragedy almost unique among ethnic cleansings in which a large portion of the ethnically cleansed weren’t expelled or molested. To the best of my knowledge, the only thing comparable is the Naqba, when most Palestinian Arabs were expelled during the Israeli War of Independence, while a large number were allowed to stay(which has since swelled to around one million).
Here’s a petition organized by Heath Lowry of Princeton University, from back in the 80s objecting to Congress attempting to argue that what happened to the Armenians was comparable to the Holocaust.
Here are the Middle Eastern specialists who signed the petition.
As you’ll notice, we’re not talking about a few hacks, but respected academics and Middle Eastern specialists from prominent universities.
What happened was a horrific ethnic cleansing, but as near as I can tell, the vast majority of Middle Eastern specialist dramatically disagree with the claims put forward by those who want to compare this to the Holocaust.
While awful, it wasn’t dramatically worse than what happened to Turks in Greece or Muslims or Hindus during the partition of India.
They know which side their bread is buttered. They get a lot of funding from Muslim countries and interest, so they can hardly be counted to be impartial. (okay, I know that the genocide was led by secularists, but it still superficially looks like an issue of Muslims being slandered by Christians)
I’m unfamiliar with what happened in Greece, so I can’t comment.
I don’t want to threadjack, so I won’t talk about partition, but to put it short, allowing it to unfold so carelessly was one of Britain’s most horrible mistakes of the 20th century.
Uh-huh.
The most prominent and respected Middle Eastern specialists can’t be counted on because they’re all the lackeys of evil Muslims.
I’m reminded of tales of the Elders of Zion and how we shouldn’t trust all those scientists who talk about global warming because they’re controlled by evil environmentalists.
So you confidently dismiss all the historians who don’t agree with the Armenian version of events as being lackeys of evil Muslims out to destroy Christians, but you’re completely unfamiliar with the situation in Greece which occurred just a few years earlier than the Armenian tragedy and was intimately connected.
What’s next, someone dismissing all the historians claims on why WWII turned out the way it did but confessing they know nothing of Pearl Harbor.
Moreover, I nearly pissed myself laughing at the idea that the Kurdish raiders who murdered Armenians were “secularists”.
For your sake, I hope you’ve never ridiculed people who don’t believe in global warming.
Well I did already imply that I was fairly ignorant on this subject, but I’m here to fight it.
The wiki page makes several specific claims of persecution by the Ottomans against the Armenians. Most can’t be explained as a response to Armenian aggression (e.g. Christians and Jews could not testify against Muslims in court. Why did this rule exist)?
The allied powers issued a number of resolutions / treaties concerning the Armenians, and the Ottoman government ostensibly implemented reforms (e.g. the Tanzimat). But each time the reforms promised much the same things as the last ones.
These seem like easy facts to objectively check; do you dispute them?
Hundreds of thousands dying is more than just an ethnic cleansing. The term “genocide” does not specify killing to the last man every member of a group, so it’s still genocide even if some armenians were allowed to live in Istanbul.
Mass burnings, drownings, typhoid inoculation, not to mention the “incompetence” of marching thousands of people out into the desert seems pretty horrific to me. These events didn’t happen?
I don’t know about Muslims, but Heath Lowry is certainly a hack for the Turkish government. He ghostwrote a Turkish ambassador’s protest letter.
Not sure how you define “dramatically worse”, but the Partition killings were happening on both sides.
So to recap, you’re dismissing the views of over 80 prominent Middle Eastern scholars from Princeton, Columbia, NYU, and similar schools because of a wikipedia page that has been put together almost entirely by activists with axes to grind?
What’s next, saying “I don’t care what all those fancy scientists say, here’s a website called the climatefraud.com which claims they’re wrong.”
To really recap, repeating an old list of scholars where most now are not willing to sign again is silly, repeating that and expecting a different result is also silly.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=13930366&postcount=53
In any case, a more recent petition was a good counter point to that out of date denialist petition from the 80’s.
http://www.chgs.umn.edu/histories/turkisharmenian/publicPetitions.html
Could you perhaps offer up a website or two, or a decent book on the topic? Something more neutral than Wikipedia? Especially if the book deals with ethnic expulsions/cleansing/genocide in the region in the late 19th to early 20th century (Greece to Armenia)?