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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.

According to the Criminal Code of 1926, Article 163, there are severe penalties for those who:

"by the misuse of religion, religious sentiment, or things that are religiously considered as holy, in any way incite the people to action prejudical to the state, or form associations for that purpose... Political associations or religious sentiments many not be formed."

Most of this Armenian-Greek stuff is the wailing of those who are angry that Anatolia wasn't dismembered along ethnic and religious lines during and following World War One, and can be dismissed for empirical reasons. For example, the Turks are supposed to have killed more people than were actually living there at the time, and the numbers keep growing. The dead don't multiply themselves, despite Armenian protestations to the contrary.

No one denies the relocations, no one denies that there was dreadful human suffering, but for the sake of the memory of the dead, get the numbers right, at least.

This was supposed to go into the Editorial section. Apologies for any inconvenience.

ka-PING!

A good summation of the NATO summit from a Turkish perspective. The essay deals with many things of great importance to US interests not touched upon in the press.

"Turkey should tell the EU to put it where the sun don't shine."

I agree.

Wished I'd been there. I would have done nothing but argue politics with Turkish leftists over endless plates of food and bottles of raki, would have been unable to have bought a single drink, and would have finished the night toasting Ataturk, Sezen Aksu, Candan Ercetin, Yildiz Tilbe, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Zulfu Livaneli, Aziz Nesin, and Walt Whitman.

Self-determination is a Marxist-Leninist buzzword which has been used by every third-world totalitarian revolutionary movement since Lenin.

By using it, you reveal yourself as one bereft of any real historical awareness, as you do by using conservative and Leftist connotation words interchangeably. If you think that justice will be served by the creation of yet another Communist hell-hole which requires the destruction of our ally, then you have some serious ideological conflicts the resolution of which are far beyond the ability of members of this forum to resolve.

There's a time and place for everything. One would hope that Chirac would have kept his thoughts to himself, smile politely and say something vague, meaningless, and pleasant, and acted in a more diplomatic manner. These NATO summits and the like are places where everyone acts to emphasize agreement and promote a generally harmonious image.

I still think that Turkey becoming a member of the EU is a slow form of national suicide, though, with the inevitable loss of national sovereignty. As things stand, Turkey would merely be a source of raw materials and cheap labor, and a market for manufactured goods and capital. EU membership would develop Turkish underdevelopment, instead of building up the Turkish political economy.

"The relity (sic) of life in Blair's Britain - A national disgrace"

It's much the same here. Bush is supposed to be a conservative, and look at the weird liberal-socialist things he's pulled as our President.

Welcome to Free Republic, BTW.

Turkey broke off relations with Germany in August of '44 and declared war 23 Feb 45.

Another fact, courtesy of declassified OSS files, is that the OSS and the British identified 1500 Abwehr (German) agents to the Turkish government, who controlled, imprisoned, or otherwise neutralized 800 of them.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center wrote up the following. Take it for what it's worth, read it fairly before condemning it. I hardly think that the Wiesenthal Center has a pro-Turkish ideological axe to grind.

Turkey's Complex Neutrality in WWII

"He would have seethed but have not shown it..."

A personal trait I wish was shared by more people, myself included.

I applaud the patience and forbearance you two have shown in this thread.

My kindest thoughts and feelings go to the friends and family of the poor unfortunates, and I pray for their rescue, release, or escape.

Why inject analysis? The USA is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet, and Bush personifies that. All that's necessary for Euro-scum to hate him, and us, is to mention personal faith, the Bible, and freedom. That's enough to send them ballistic.

Regional speech patterns doesn't enter into it.

What irks me to distraction is that Bush is unwilling or unable to confront these twerps and stick up for us in the combat ring of ideological confrontation.

"Bush becomes flustered and arrogant with even the simplest of questions,"

Bush wasn't arrogant, he was just trying to lay a burden on the reporter's heart. Bush is unable to articulate and expand upon the basic premises of the Declaration, so why should we expect him to seriously confront the liberal-socialist axis with nothing more than platitudes?

Let us know about those Turks just captured and threatened with beheading when you know more.

Since I reject your underlying premise that the Kurds are a group of noble mountain warriors who'd rather be herding goats if it weren't for their fiendish Turkish neighbors, I must also reject your conclusion that a Kurdish state is a solution.

The proposed Kurdish Worker's Democratic People's Republic requires about a third of Anatolia, and to do that, the PKK has committed terrorist actions against Turkey for nigh on twenty years now. The Turks have been having their equivalent of 9-11 about three times a year for an awful long time, but through a paranoid, psychotic reversal of reasoning, they somehow are the villains in this conflict.

I am reminded of how the Viet Minh were portrayed as mere nationalistic agrarian reformers forty yers ago. The same mentality that doomed millions in Southeast Asia to mass graves and slave labor is at work here.

And this is supposed to be a conservative forum.

Kurds and Kurdistans

I'm extremely curious as to how the Istanbul NATO summit works out. Hopfully Bush will lambaste the PKK at least as much as he lambastes al-Quaeda.

I wonder what odds the bookies are laying on that one.

Here's the entire interview on mp3. It's at least ten megs big, but if you really want to hear the entire thing, there it is.

Bush-Coleman interview.

The President tells Coleman "Let me finish..." at least five or six times. That is as close to confrontation as he gets.

Here, in a nutshell, is the entire ideological confrontation between the USA and the liberal-socialist axis. Socialists articulate their pathological reactions to momentary impressions using loaded language calculated infer the worst possible image of the USA, and instead of unambiguous disdain, confronting the premises and refuting the conclusions as any good teacher would with a disruptive student radical, Bush tries to picture us as the nicest people you'd ever want to meet.

This affability presumes several premises, the most obvious being, "Hey, why are you upset at us for? We agree on basically the same things. We're here to help the least fortunate. We are the most altruistic nation on Earth, we're spending 15 billion dollars on AIDS..." etcetera, ad nauseum.

Bush and the GOP don't get it. When two groups who share the same basic premise compete, the most zealous always wins. By assenting to the same basic premises of liberal-socialism, Bush loses even before the contest begins.

One cannot make friends with these people. The Euro-scum despise the basic ideology of this country, they despise the Declaration, and Bush is unable to articulate what the principles of this country are, much less confront and refute their enemies.

Instead, he tries to lay a burden on their hearts through affability, in the hopes, I guess, that they finally make their way to the altar in contrite humility while the choir plays "Just As I Am."

Would Reagan have stood for this Euro-scum crap?

"When an 11 man Turkish Special Forces assassination team crossed into Kirkuk, US Green Berets sent them home."

Let's ignore the fact that those Turks had been there long before we were and had been keeping tabs on Kurdish terrorists. I wish that they in fact had been an assassination team, but the fact is that they weren't. The fact is that ignorant and idiotic actions like the hog-tying and blindfolding of these allied troops, and even more ignorant and idiotic support for these idiotic actions, are some of the reasons why I posted the following in #7:

"Once again, countries fighting for their lives against Communism and worse are finding their hands tied by US policies which can have only one outcome: victory for the guerillas, and, like in South Vietnam, the victims are being blamed for the consequences."

This attitude can be stretched all the way back to Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination of Diem, and the like. With the sole exception of Reagan, the lesson of history is that, if you are a nation fighting for survival and come to depend on the USA, the odds are on that you will be left stranded on the beach, betrayed, thrown to the wolves and killed while grinning, amiable buffoons in the White House tut-tut the whole matter, and eventually describe the entire process as unfortunate, inevitable and unavoidable.

And there are always those who sit back and smile in fiendish glee at the trouble we cause. And this is supposed to be a conservative forum?