I feel so ignorant, because I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this before this year. Maybe we touched briefly on it in school, but I don’t remember about it. My education was in the deep south, where most of the history we learned was about the Civil War. It makes me feel so strange, because now I work in Glendale and live in L.A. and they close stores, honor the day, etc. and here I am going, “Armenian Genocide? What Armenian Genocide?” Dur.
The slaughter of over a million Armenians during WW I wasn’t generally covered by most basic history classes unless you took something that covered that period specifically. But then I find that actual history in public schools is given pretty short shrift these days any way.
A quick seach turned up this site, I’m sure you can find more with a decent search engine and a little time, if you are so inclined:
http://www.umd.umich.edu/dept/armenian/facts/answers.html
To make a long story short, the Armenians are a Caucasian ethnic group/nation. When WWI broke out, Armenia was part of the Ottoman Empire, on the border with Russia. The Russians had claimed Armenia for some time before that, and Orthodox Christian Russia considered itself the “Protector” of the Armenians. (Armenia is a Christian country…one of the oldest in the world, and the Ottoman empire was Muslim). At the time the war broke out, there had been tension between the Armenians and the Ottoman government. The Armenians, like most of the ethnic minorities in the empire, had an independence movement, and there had been, over the past 10 years, demonstrations and sporadic violence.
So, the war broke out, and the Ottomans did pretty badly from the beginning. Looking for a scapegoat, the government turned to the Armenians, who they accused of being traitors and pro-Russian. The army, led by Turkish nationalist officers, started rounding up Armenians, and either shooting them or transporting them to other parts of the empire. Most of those transported starved to death en route or after they arrived at their destination. A lot of Armenians fled, and a large number of the refugees ended up in the United States, and, as you’ve seen, there are towns in California with a large Armenian population
The genocide is still being denied by Turkey, who understands that it makes them look really bad, and, I think, out of fear that admitting it would require them to give concessions to those Armenians in Turkey, as well as to Armenia.
That’s sick and sad. It reminds me of Germany after the war denying that the holocaust really happened. Or, maybe it’s just a lot of shame.