The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Denying Genocides

Denying Genocides
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Friday, September 3 2010, 14:39:18 (UTC)
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Apparently it´s a crime, in Europe, to deny there was an Armenian genocide...three people have been sentenced in the past to pay fines for denying there was such a genocide...and, denial of the Armenian genocide is placed on an equal level with denial of the Holocaust.

The arguments of both sides are extensive and inconclusive....first you have to define genocide....which is not merely massacre...or human rights violations, or crimes against humanity....to be a genocide it must be proven that responsible parties, at the highest levels of government had as, their stated and official goal,the complete destruction of a particular group...this is what is lacking in the evidence that supporters of the Armenian genocide provide...true, there were Turkish officials who were more than glad to kill Armenians....but many of them were tried and condemned by Turkey itself...plus which documents purporting to show such orders from on high existed were later proven to be false...and Jews were never implicated in the kinds of blatant and overt acts against their own government as were Armenian militant groups.

Armenians engaged in treasonous acts in time of war, against their own government and in the pay of those attacking their government...this is the highest form of treason and in time of warfare merits the harshest treatment...as now in America many are calling for private Manning´s death for leaking secret documents, in time of war.

We can argue the points in contention forever and get nowhere....except to say that equating the Holocaust with whatever happened to Armenians in Turkey is incorrect...precisely because there is not the kind of direct and abundant evidence for government participation and direction at the highest levels in Turkey as there is for Germany...

There is one other disturbing ommission left out of all of the accounts which attempt to seem fair and unbiased...a very flagrant difference between what happened in Germany and the rest of Europe with what happened in Turkey, or the Ottoman Empire and that is that in Turkey, no systematic, state-sponsored effort was made to root our every single Armenian...Armenians in major cities and away from the relevant border areas were left unmolested, their churches open, and free to worship even while Christian nations were attacking their lands.

By contrast and well before the actual war began, the German government began its discriminatory policies and herding of Jews into ghettos and then concentration camps...decrees were passed de-legitimaizng marriage between Jew and Aryan and a host of discriminatory practices which never occured in Turkey, and certainly never before the war declared against them by Christian nations, starting with Russia in the 18th century. Before then Christian, Jew and Muslims lived together in peace, far more at peace than Catholic lived with Protestant in Europe...and the Ottoman Empire was the only place on earth where this occured...by contrast Jews and Muslims were persecuted, murdered, their children taken from them, their wealth stolen wherever they came under Christian control. For the Ottomans to break with their own tolerant history so abruptly can only mean that something drastic had taken place: and this was the coalition of Christian nations who made no secret of their intentions, which were to steal the oil-rich lands they are still fighting over...and one effectivetactic was to seduce the Turkish Christians into fighting on their side and against their own governments.

In Germany and other European countries even genologies were examined to see if a Jew appeared anywhere among the ancestors of a non-Jew and any fraction of "Jewish blood" condemned the person to death and worse.

If the Armenian genocide is to be equated with the Nazi Holocaust then there must be evidence that Turkish authorities were as dilligent and determined as Germans were to track down and exterminate every single Armenian anywhere in the Empire...and no such evidence has been presented and the very fact that Armenians and other Christians remained unmolested speaks in other parts of the Empire speaks for itself.

Clearly there was no "systematic and determined and organized" effort to kill every single Armenian by Turkish authorities as there was to kill every single Jew by the German government.

We can argue whether what happened in Turkey was a genocide...but there is no argument over whether the Turks acted in as thorough a manner in hunting down Armenians as did the Nazis in grabbing every single Jew they could...churches remained open in Turkey where all synagogues in Nazi-occupied lands were closed and many destroyed...Armenians were allowed to practise their religion where Jews were forbidden...Armenians continued to own and operate their buisness and keep their personal wealth where Jews were stripped of everything and denied even the right to work to sustain life and family.

Plus, there is no proof at all that Jews anywhere formed militias to fight their German neighbors or government, or accepted money and weapons from the Allies to stage raids against the German army or civilians, or did anything but remain loyal to their country of birth, Germany...whereas there is ample evidence that Armenian militias actively fought againt their country of birth and in the pay of those attacking it....the only instance of armed resistance against the Nazis by the Jews came in the Warsaw ghetto and that was a collective act of desperation, which the Nazis put down ruithlessley...Armenian militants on the other hand formed private armies early on and carried out attacks against their own government...to say that the Jews of Germany were a threat to German security is to tell a lie...to admit that the Armenians posed an active threat to the security of Turkey is to admit a truth, easily verifiable.

But the one single thing that destroys the notion of a genocide in Turkey and any resemblance to what the Nazis and other Europeans did is the fact that Armenians managed to live and survive unmolested in parts of the Empire where this was impossible for Jews under Nazi, Christian control.

There were massacres, there were crimes against humanity and there were human right´s abuses...but war itself is crime against civilian humanity and results in massacres and rights´violations...especially when citizens are suborned to fight against their own government, as many Armenians were. But a genocide is a specific act..it has a unique meaning...it is not mob violence or personal vendetta, or even massacre...it must contain an element of professed desire, well articulated and implemented at the highest levels of government, to kill off a particualr group...and this describes the Nazis perfectly as well as the intent of the Sanctions imposed by the United States against Iraq in which over 700,000 Iraqi children, under the age of five, died as a result of starvation and disease...and this policy was a formal one, verified and approved of by then Secretary of State Albright who was quoted as saying the deaths of 5000 Iraqi children a week as a result of Sanctions, was "acceptable"...and to date no American offials have been formally condemned or tried for this policy.

This is a fact which those who insist there was a genocide in Turkey refuse to deal with...or, I haven´t seen it addressed by any...Christian motives are highly suspect in this regard...chagrined to find that only Christians stand universally condemned for the Holocaust, they are frantic to lay the same crime at the feet of Muslims....besides which, so long as Christians don´t admit that they engaed in genocide and holcaust against other Christians, they cannot be trusted to be fair and impartial....on St Barthlomew´s Day,in France in the 16th century, Catholics rose against their Protestant neighbors, friends and family and killed 10,000 of them in 24 hours...and the Pope gave thanks to God and bells were rung and the te Deum sung....if this was not Genocide then what is?



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