The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> The ERlements of Truth

The ERlements of Truth
Posted by atheist (Guest) - Friday, March 5 2010, 19:54:05 (UTC)
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...the two points of view expressed here are an interesting example of opinion vs facts...or even common sense vs prejudice. Often our boys like to say "we both have opinions, you have yours and I have mine and there's no way to prove mine is wrong or yours is right, so I am as right as you are". But the second part of this article is NOT opinion...at least not mostly....

>GUENTER LEWY, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS
>
>According to the Genocide Convention of 1948, intent is a necessary condition of genocide - intent to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.

...this is a fact, not an opinion. I mean the actual definition of the word "Genocide". We all know by now that our boys and girls play fast and loose with facts, trying desperately to present their opinions as facts, and facts, which they don't like, as mere opinions. Lewy doesn't define Genocide the way he likes....he actually uses a dictionary, where we can easily see that Genocide doesn't mean "killing a lot of people". Genocide, to be real, has to carry the all important element of INTENT...you have to aim for, plan and carry out with the deliberate INTENTION etc. It is not mob violence...or vigilante action...it isn't even mass lynchings....not on their own and definitely not when carried out by mere civilians. No one is trying to denigrate or de-glorify the victims of mass killing...but words have MEANING...and unless you wish to remain a barbarian whose vocabulary is made of sixteen words which you find adequate to express all the limited thoughts in your head and heart, then words have SPECIFIC meaning for various and even closely related ideas.

Killing lots of innocent people is bad...killing people because you are afraid of what they MIGHT do someday, especially young children whom you may wish to kill off early, before they can breed, is particularly nasty and no one denies that some in Turkey took revenge on whatever Christians they could get their hands on...but since Turks weren't doing anything like that BEFORE 1915, it might be a good idea to ask if anything was going on at that time which could drive some Turks to such cruel and desperate acts...and yes, there WAS something about to happen, which had begun just recently and that was the entire Christian world, save for Germany, got together, eagerly, to wage war against Turkey for no other reason than petroleum...and as we see the United States, especially the very same Congress that just voted this lie against Turkey, were active participants in unleashing an unjust war against civilians in Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of young children, and not 90 years ago but to this very day and starting 17 years ago, Christians should ease up on mis-representing what happened in Turkey to Christians....
>
>Hence the crucial question in this controversy is not the huge loss of life experienced by Ottoman Armenians during World War I, in and of itself, but rather whether the Young Turk regime intentionally sought the deaths that we know to have occurred.

...precisely. What Christians are hoping to do is equate "large numbers dead" with Genocide. They pretend to be shocked that anyone would "defend" some killings, which undoubtedly occurred in isolated cases, when all we are trying to do is protect the integrity of the language, so we may relate to one another more accurately and perhaps avoid future conflicts.
>
>The relocation of most Armenians to the interior of the Ottoman Empire was most likely to have been a badly mismanaged wartime security measure, rather than a premeditated programme of extermination and hence genocide.

...exactly. Since the Turks were faced with armies attacking their country by land, border security was paramount....and, from bitter experience, they knew that Christians living on the borders were very likely to welcome attacking Christians as their "liberators"...a common mistake we have ALL made, to our loss. Moving those Christians further to the interior was a correct move, under the circumstances....being at war with their entire empire threatened the Turks can be forgiven for not reserving the necessary resources to move those Christians efficiently and humanely....in fact the Turkish soldier wasn't treated with any deal of humanity or consideration so why should the Christians have expected any better?
>
>Many aspects of the relocation support this position:
>
> * The large Armenian communities of Constantinople, Smyrna and Aleppo were not relocated and survived the war largely intact. These exemptions are analogous to Hitler failing to include the Jews of Berlin, Cologne and Munich in the Final Solution.

...again, this is fact, not opinion! It is a FACT that Christian communities all over Turkey and Iran as well were not targeted in any way....such a thing would never happen in a true Genocide.

> * The relocation experienced much variation that depended on geography and the attitude of local officials. In many places Protestant and Catholic Armenians as well as needed artisans were exempted. The same goes for the large number of Armenians who often were allowed, or even forced, to convert. In the absence of a large Kurdish population, no massacres took place in Cilicia, and a substantial part of the exiles sent to Southern Syria and Palestine survived.

...where could a Jew have been safe in all of Europe when the Nazis unleashed their true Genocide? What Jews were spared? Indeed, officially sanctioned agencies were set up to determine how much Jewish "blood" Christians had in their ancestry...anything above a teaspoon would send you off to death....THAT is Genocide.

...often in their history Jews suffered persecution, mass killings and deportations, yet historians have never referred to these acts as Genocide....not until the German GOVERNMENT instituted far-ranging policies and created the mechanisms and institutions to actively seek out and destroy ALL Jews did history grant this awful label of "Genocide" to their actions...because this time around there was a well-articulated INTENT to wipe every Jew off the face of the earth...this MADE it Genocide and nothing less.

...what our boys and other Christians are trying to do is usurp the term Genocide and its specific meaning to suit their agenda of hatred against Islam, ironically the same sort of hatred which led to the greatest case of Genocide the world has known, brought to us by their fellow-Christians. And yet it is their hatred of Muslims, now, which motivates them and not any love for dead Armenians. Where before it was hatred of Jews, a hatred so intense it LED to the very Genocide they pretend to be condemning in their case against Muslims....people they hate as irrationally and completely as they once did Jews...now their target is Islam.

..it is not love of Armenians or fellow Christians that drives this mania, it is rather, as with the case of the Jews, a HATRED, only this time of Islam instead of Judaism....their centuries-long campaign against Judaism was a great success....now they have turned their weapons and their pious-tears-for-victims-of-genocide against Muslims...now it's THEIR turn...and just as Christians justified themselves by claiming that Jews had declared war against Germany, now they claim they are only seeking "justice" for innocent victims, before Islam "commits more Genocide"....in other words they are DEFENDING themselves again from Muslim ATTACK!
>
>Well-known scholars of Ottoman history, such as Bernard Lewis and Andrew Mango, question the appropriateness of the genocide label.

...this is the core of the controversy; not that many people died or even were killed, but that nothing here indicates Genocide. As the United States so often does, to this very day, the Turks will say that MANY innocent Turks died or were killed during that war...Turks, some of whom were Christian, Muslims and Jewish...and that all the innocent victims were collateral damage.
>
>It is time to acknowledge that we are dealing with a genuine historical controversy that should be resolved by scholars rather than politicians.

...or taxi drivers and engineers.
>
>Ronald Suny is the author of Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Indiana University Press, 1993). Guenter Lewy is the author of The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide (University of Utah Press, 2005).



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