[Mortimer Snavely]

Genocide is a precisely defined term which requires more than diffuse outrage to be used correctly. Cavalier monkeying around with numbers does not indicate the real scholarship and quite frankly tedious drudgery required to support the use of the word. It is a concept posited, rather than investigated, and disputing that is strongly frowned upon. Even the best scholarship of the period, Rummel's, by his own admission has internal factors of error higher than three hundred percent.

No one in Turkey denies that lots of folks died horribly during relocations during WWI. No one disputes that there was a "Trail of Tears." What is disputed is the allegation that there was a politically mandated, bureaucratically administered policy of mass murder, which is what genocide actually is.

When everything becomes genocide, then nothing is really genocide, and the word becomes mere grist to be ground in amy ideological mill. In this case, the large numbers of Turks killed in the same period in the same manner are ignored.

Taken together, all this tells me that the word genocide is thrown around for the emotional connotations it creates, instead of an accurate description of what happened.

[adam_az]

I agree with a lot of what you wrote, but that doesn't counter the fact that the Ottoman Turks had a terrible policy that ended up killing a very narrowly defined group of people.

It shows that the statement that Turkey has been a place of tolerance for hundreds of years is a flat out lie.

[Lazamataz]

Mortimer Snavely's last post. What a good one it was, too.....