Posted on 11/10/2003 11:56:08 AM PST by a_Turk
No you don't understand. The Armenian genocide began in the last years of the Ottoman Empire, at the very time that the Sultan had lost authority and the "young Turks" movement had taken over the military. The campaign was only just beginning in 1918, and came to a height during the 1920-21 period, when Attaturk was in power.
The attack by Kemalist units in 1919 against the city of Marash in January 1920 was accompanied by large-scale slaughtering of the Armenians spelling the beginning of the end for the remnant Armenian population.
The Armenians of Hajen (Hadjin) put up a last desperate fight for seven months only to be reduced by October 1920 to less than five hundred survivors who fled from a city completely torched by the besieging Turks.
In the meantime, the Turkish Nationalist forces had gone to war against the Republic of Armenia. With secret instructions from the Ankara government to proceed with the physical elimination of Armenia, General Kiazim Karabekir seized half the territories of Armenia in November 1920 as Red Army units Sovietized the remaining areas. Once again the Armenian population was driven out at the point of the sword with heavy casualties as the city of Kars and its surrounding region were annexed by Turkey.
What is it with your strange infatuation with tyrants? Are you one of those "victim loves his oppressor" types?
Nothing wrong with that - just that there is a huge difference between the high culture and history of Armenia and the tribal Turks who don't even have a written language for God's sake!
I have been in Turkiye and I have been in Greece and I have known Turks and I have Known Greeks and you know what? They are pretty much the same people. Their food is the same with variations, their music is the same with regiional variations, they drink the same booze.
The religion is different(both Greeks and Turks seem to have a terror of the Evil Eye) but the Turks do not hold to the crazier interpretations of Islam and live in ways quite familiar to westerners and the Greeks have experienced long periods of dictatorship that the Turks have been free of since Ataturk and.
Yes, Mustafa was, indeed, a dictator but he was Ataturk a possibly unique character in history. He had a design, an ideal and he took power from a corrupt monarchy of sorts, built a system that would give citizens an optimum level of freedom,given their history, and then got out of the way. He did not set up a succession whereby his designated or genetic heirs would continue to control the state.The army has a constitutional role in the Turkish Republic and is scrupulous in safeguarding the republic. Individual Turks and Greeks display the same passions about each otherbut the hatred seems to be held by fewer Turks than Greeks but it is in both.
Suffice it to say that the democratic "forms" of which you speak are nothing more than window dressing for the naive public. The corrupt military runs the show there. Turkey is nothing more or less than a glorified North Korea with a personality cult of Kemal (dead dog) rather than a living one like Castrol or little kim.
As for your "knowledge" of the similarities between the culture of greeks and the the turks - what culture Turks have was acquired when they invaded and took up the customs and mores of the conquered.
Next time you visit - dispense with the cabaret and belly dancers and bazaars and try talking to the fearful Christians and Kurds who are all too aware of the terror that turkey is.
Among the Turks I know more Christians than I know Moslems. You argue like a rabid leftist in that you have little in the way of facts and because one side is designated "evil" then everything bad you can think of to say is legitimate whether there is any truth to it or not. That is purely emotional argument and is characteristic of leftists of all stripes.Communists carry it to an extreme but are cold about it- not feeling any of the emotion they are evoking. A conservative who makes his arguments in such a manner will find a resonance only with leftists who will not disbelieve him because belief is not relevant to their cause, but they will not accept those arguments because they are, of course, not "correct." I repeat, the Turks and the Greeks are the same people and if the Turks took their culture from the Greeks it does not give the right to commit genocide to the Greeks and does not make them a Superior People. And thanks, I didn't know that Greeks invented belly dancing.
Your beliefs are based upon emotional argument and unwillingness to recognize the horrors that occured against the Eastern Orthodox Christians.
Yes, Greeks and Turks share some common history - albeit unwillingly on the part of the Christians---however, to argue that they are the same people is to fly in the face of all anthropological and historical research that has been done.
The only "greek blood" that turks have acquired is the blood that the Christians shed at the hands of the Muslim Turks and the blood they managed to acquire by raping Christian women.
Now go back to the Turkish propaganda and armchair popular History you have been doing...
The evidence is overwhelming and has been posted over and over again. Sorry if you haven't seen it but as a public service I will continue to post the facts of the genocide against the Christians by the Muslim turks again and again. Be on the lookout...
Hoping you will study the facts and learn. You should know that history is not a made up fabric propagandized by the Turkish parastate. The similarities with the Soviet system of historical revisionism is alive and well among those who support Turkey's view of history. They share lots with the way islamics see the world as well. Without the Bolsheviks supporting kemal Turkey would have been a more prosperous and Judaeo Christian nation today. Millions would have survived the holocausts of the post WWI era.
Stew on that...
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