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Theme Changer

 Topic: The Armenian genocide a hundred years on

 (Read 40554 times)
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  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #60 - April 24, 2015, 08:21 PM

    Turks, Armenians commemorate Armenian genocide in Istanbul

    http://www.todayszaman.com/national_turks-armenians-commemorate-armenian-genocide-in-istanbul_378922.html
    Quote
    In the morning, Turkish, Armenian and foreign activists gathered in front of the Museum for Turkish and Islamic Arts, holding photographs of the Armenian intellectuals, community leaders and political activists who were arrested by Ottoman authorities on April 24, 1915 in an event that marked the beginning of the deportations and massacres of Armenians.

    “Precisely 100 years ago today, the first arrests that would come to symbolize the Armenian genocide began in İstanbul. … What we speak of here is a crime lasting 100 years. A denial lasting 100 years,” read the press statement recited at the demonstration, signed by the Anatolian Cultures and Research Association (Aka-Der), the Human Rights Association (İHD) Committee Against Racism and Discrimination, Nor Zartonk, the Platform for Confronting History, the Turabdin Assyrians Platform and the Zan Foundation for Social, Political and Economic Research.

    The Turkish government, despite international pressure, does not accept the notion that the mass deaths of Armenians constituted genocide.

    During Friday morning's demonstrations, human rights lawyer Eren Keskin of İHD stated: “We are the grandchildren of the perpetrators of genocide. Perhaps not each and every one of us comes from the lineage of the people who directly participated in the massacres and the plunders, but we were born into their ethnic and religious identity. We belong to a social group that has unquestioningly benefitted from the order and privileges created by the perpetrators of genocide.”

    The press statement also explained the reasons for gathering in front of the museum, located in the touristic Sultanahmet neighborhood of İstanbul, explaining, “The historical building before which we now stand and which now functions as the Museum for Turkish and Islamic Arts, is also the Ibrahim Pasha Palace. This palace was used for many years as a prison, and included a jail for children. This is where the detainees of April 24 were incarcerated before they were sent from Haydarpaşa [station] to the depths of the depths of Anatolia, and then to their deaths.”

    Speaking separately to Today's Zaman, Keskin shared her observations about where Turkey currently stands, amid international pressure to recognize the events of 1915 as “genocide.” “We have seen progress among the Turkish people, but what we want is for the government to face the fact of the genocide. Rest assured, if the government accepts the genocide then the people will follow and accept it as well,” Keskin stated.

    Several other commemoration ceremonies were also held on Friday. One demonstration took place in front of the Haydarpaşa train station on the Asian side of İstanbul and another was held at the Şişli cemetery where the body of Sevag Balıkçı rests. Turkish-Armenian Sevag Balıkçı was 25 years old when he was shot, in what official reports from military commanders claim was an accident, while performing his mandatory military service in 2011. The young man's family and human rights activists believe the killing was deliberate. Balıkçı's murder occurred on April 24, 2011, and it was later revealed that the man responsible for his death was an ultranationalist.

    Conflict erupted between a group of students and private security guards from İstanbul Technical University (İTÜ). According to the Doğan news agency, students attempted to hold a commemoration for the victims of the events of 1915 and had unfurled banners and placards at the Maslak campus of İTÜ. However, the university's security guards soon intervened, using their batons and throwing chairs at the students.

    Turkish nationalists also took to the streets in large numbers on Friday to protest the condemnation of the events of 1915 as “genocide.” The ultranationalist Homeland Party (VP) marched, with leader Doğu Perinçek, on İstanbul's İstiklal Avenue, refuting the accusations of genocide, chanting slogans such as, “We did not commit a genocide; we defended our native land.”

    Perinçek gave a speech in front of the French Consulate in İstanbul on Friday afternoon, attesting that the notion of “genocide” is a fabrication propagated by “Western imperialists” during World War I, and that: “The Armenian massacres are a lie! This is a propaganda attack about events that took place during a war 100 years ago!” He also argued: “The historical events of 1915 are not open to debate. Once again we are at war against imperialists, this time with the imperialist US at the forefront.”

    In other nationalist demonstrations, at around 7:00 a.m. on Friday morning, the Nationalist Party of Turkey (MTP) and the Turan Ocakları, another nationalist group, left black metal wreaths in front of the Agos Armenian weekly newspaper. The building, which used to be an Armenian elementary school, is the current location of the Hrant Dink Foundation, which works to create a dialogue between Turkey and Armenia and to preserve Armenian culture within Turkey. The foundation was established after the murder of Hrant Dink, the founding editor of the Agos, who was assassinated just outside the newspaper's former building in 2007. The police arrived to remove the wreaths from the scene at around 11:00 a.m., according to a source from the foundation.

  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #61 - April 24, 2015, 09:19 PM

    Kurds in Turkey atone for their role in the Armenian genocide

    http://www.aina.org/news/20150424144941.htm

    Skeletons in the Turkish closet

    https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/ayşe-kadıoğlu/skeletons-in-turkish-closet-remembering-armenian-genocide

    Syriacs urge Turkey to recognize massacres

    http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/04/turkey-syriacs-urge-turkey-to-recognize-massacres.html#
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #62 - April 24, 2015, 09:37 PM

    Quote
    Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of Nazi Germany (1933-45)

    Home > Genocide Research > Statements on Record Relating to the Armenian Genocide

    "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
    [August 22, 1939]

    My decision to attack Poland was arrived at last spring. Originally, I feared that the political constellation would compel me to strike simultaneously at England, Russia, France, and Poland. Even this risk would have had to be taken.

    Ever since the autumn of 1938, and because I realized that Japan would not join us unconditionally and that Mussolini is threatened by that nit-wit of a king and the treasonable scoundrel of a crown prince, I decided to go with Stalin.

    In the last analysis, there are only three great statesmen in the world, Stalin, I, and Mussolini. Mussolini is the weakest, for he has been unable to break the power of either the crown or the church. Stalin and I are the only ones who envisage the future and nothing but the future. Accordingly, I shall in a few weeks stretch out my hand to Stalin at the common German-Russian frontier and undertake the redistribution of the world with him.

    Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter — with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me.

    I have issued the command — and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad — that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness — for the present only in the East — with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?


    http://www.armenian-genocide.org/hitler.html

    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #63 - April 24, 2015, 09:54 PM

    From a discussion with an otherwise open-minded and reasonable young Turkish lad:

    What prove! Do you have any idea about whose phony documents are them? Have you ever read any ottoman documents about Armenian incidents? All of your claims are one sided... You should be ashamed as a member of a nation that has been suffered and maligned for decades... The whole world is lying about us.
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #64 - April 24, 2015, 09:58 PM

    Right ... ! Sounds ... Reasonable?
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #65 - April 24, 2015, 11:23 PM

    Why is the UK government so afraid to speak of Armenian genocide?

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2015/apr/24/why-uk-government-so-afraid-speak-armenian-genocide
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #66 - April 24, 2015, 11:37 PM

    Hidden Armenians of Turkey seek to reclaim their erased identities

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/world/europe/armenians-turkey.html
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #67 - April 25, 2015, 12:00 AM

    Hidden Armenians of Turkey seek to reclaim their erased identities

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/world/europe/armenians-turkey.html


    Wow! Imagine discovering you are not who you thought you were!!? That must turn your whole world upside down.

    Come to think of it I can empathise to a certain extent due to my own experiences lol. Losing your identity and being faced with one you thought was at the very least alien, is a very difficult thing to deal with.

    Goodness I've been reading so much about the suffering of the Armenian people recently - I feel so sorry for what they have had to endure.
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #68 - April 25, 2015, 12:00 AM

    An American Muslim responds to Muslim orgs questioning Armenian genocide

    http://religiondispatches.org/an-american-muslim-responds-to-muslim-orgs-questioning-armenian-genocide/
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #69 - April 25, 2015, 01:47 AM

    A somewhat more coherent though no less disingenuous presentation of the official Turkish point of view, presented but a Turkish professor and Tal Buenos, an Israeli.

    Stop "genocidizing"
    http://www.internationalpolicydigest.org/2015/04/23/stop-genocidizing/

    Basically, they had it coming.

    When a group of people challenges the sovereignty of its government through revolutionary activities and then suffers as a result of their efforts, the result is the political price of such actions. Furthermore, such cases must be recognized as war when the turmoil includes interference of yet another nation that has a stake in the conflict.


    Other arguments include "Armenians massacred an equal number of Muslims," "It wasn't intentional," "Muslims were expelled from their former territories in the Balkans," "Eyewitness testimony of the time was biased and unreliable," "There is no document stating 'Kill all Armenians.'" Etc.

    I'm not sure why Turkey, which boasts about "Fatih" to Istanbul tourists, welcomes visiting dignitaries dressed up as Janissaries, and counsels its youth that "Every Turk is born a soldier," would be surprised that most people are not convinced that the Ottoman Empire was  innocent of state sponsored genocide.
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #70 - April 25, 2015, 08:39 AM

    Quote
    Through the generations, even while living as Muslims, many were aware of their Armenian heritage. “It was all anyone talked about in this region,” said Aziz Yaman, 58, but only within the family, in private. Even today, he added, his family keeps to one old Armenian custom — making wine, and drinking it.


    From NYT article above

    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #71 - April 25, 2015, 08:51 AM

    Armenians worldwide mark 1915 genocide

    http://www.cbsnews.com/news/armenians-worldwide-mark-1915-genocide-of-1-5-million-people/
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #72 - April 25, 2015, 08:58 AM

    I am getting the impression that fascism is actually a late Ottoman idea, and that Ataturk was actually a fascist.

    Quote
    In 1913, the Committee of Union and Progress, a xenophobic, nationalistic and militaristic junta (in stark contrast to the historically more pluralistic traditions of Ottoman governance), seized the Ottoman Empire and attempted to rebuild it in the image of secular European nationalism. In 1915, a few months after joining the fighting in World War 1, CUP organized for the elimination by transfer, and other far more brutal and direct means, the Armenian Christian population of eastern Anatolia.


    link above American Muslim

    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #73 - April 25, 2015, 09:23 AM



    Meline Toumani - With this madness what art could there be?

    http://m.thenation.com/article/184225-madness-what-art-could-there-be


    Reviews of Meline Toumani's book 'There Was and There Was Not'

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/books/review/there-was-and-there-was-not-by-meline-toumani.html?_r=0

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/review-there-was-and-there-was-not-hate-and-possibility-by-meline-toumani/2014/12/05/5c7587e0-5959-11e4-8264-deed989ae9a2_story.html


    A short radio interview with Meline Toumani

    http://www.npr.org/books/authors/372906651/meline-toumani




    Interview from the Istanbul Armenian magazine Agos

    http://www.agos.com.tr/en/article/10264/armenian-identity-is-wounded-with-hatred

    Meline Toumani is a journalist who was born in Iran, and grew up in the USA. She has written extensively for the New York Times, and her first book ‘There Was and There Was Not’ was recently published in the US, almost immediately receiving a strong reaction because of its unique and unprecedented viewpoint on Armenians, Genocide and the relationship between Armenians and Turks. In her book, Toumani holds a critical mirror to Diaspora Armenians based on her personal experiences, while recounting her confrontation with her own prejudices, her experience of living in Turkey and her effort to understand society in Turkey, and ultimately, her journey towards becoming an individual without severing her ties with her Armenian identity. Throughout the book, Toumani seeks answers to questions such as, “Is it possible to remain a member of a group if you do not feel comfortable with its discourses and behaviour?”, “How is it possible to recognize a tragedy without exploiting it?” and “How can the Genocide be remembered without succumbing to hatred?” The book received harsh reactions from Armenian circles in the US, and some even called for a boycott. We spoke to Toumani in New York, where she lives.

    How did the need to write this book develop? What kind of a journey was the writing process?

    When I started writing this book I had a specific vision, and the book turned out to be something completely different. I started with the vision that there must be a way to show Armenians to the Turks, and Turks to the Armenians, in a sense, opening a window for both sides.

    I was going to travel to Turkey as a Diaspora Armenian, be patient and open-minded, and not antagonistic. I'm not talking about being open-minded about the Turkish version of what happened in 1915; I wanted to be open-minded about understanding society in Turkey, and I wanted to understand what kinds of views ordinary Turks really had about Armenians and the Genocide, outside of the official statements.

    But that was a long time ago, because I realized very quickly that the situation in Turkey was a lot worse than I thought. The issue was no longer about Armenia or Turkey, but about creating a space for myself; a space where I didn’t feel that my way of thinking was defined by any political group, lobbying group, or my family. Being a part of a community is a strange and distorting experience, and this is my story of how I grappled with it.

    You write about how Diaspora Armenians are full of hatred. Most of the reactions are related to this. Did you hesitate before openly writing about the hatred?

    I did and didn’t at the same time. It has surprised me how much people focus on that word, and it bothers me. The US media were really fixated on this word, too, and conversations began with,  ‘Oh, so you are raised to hate Turks’. I realized that this was becoming too distracting, so I started to rephrase it, saying, ‘Yes, there is hate, but there is a very specific reason for it. It’s very natural for a community to feel this way as their ancestors suffered from a Genocide and Turkey continues to deny it, it is not a random expression of hate.”

    Were you also trapped by hatred? To what extent was the hate significant in your own experience?

    It was there and didn’t fit with who I was. When I was 25, I had an American boyfriend. Once we were in San Francisco, there is a street called ‘Turk Street’, we took a cab to a movie theatre on the intersection of Turk Street and another street. The driver asked us whether to drop us off at Turk Street or the other street. My boyfriend replied, ‘We are not getting off at Turk Street!’

    It was as if I had trained him to think this way. Then the driver turned around and said, ‘I am a Turk’. Instead of apologizing for my boyfriend’s remark,I said something along the lines of ‘In 1915, your ancestors massacred two thirds of our population’. I wasn’t a child anymore, I was 25, but I would still say something like that at that age. When I was 28 or 29, I started to realize that this kind of behaviour is not funny, it’s embarrassing, and it’s being idiotic, racist. It wasn’t who I wanted to be! The book, and the experience of living in Turkey, liberated me from these feelings; it liberated me from perceiving Turks as evil. Still, it doesn’t mean that I have lost every bit of prejudice; because it’s a long process.

    In the book, you say being Armenian is an obstacle for your identity, was your Armenian identity becoming a burden for you?

    The word burden sounds bad; it is the feeling that every time you try to create something, there is this mission and agenda that you are supposed to serve, every time there was an assignment in school I would find a way to make it about the Genocide; for me this is a problem. For instance, if you want to write a novel about genocide, then a politicized framework drives that process; and that framework has largely been created by Armenian Genocide recognition campaigns. There are things that you can explore, but in the end you know where the story has to end. This is antietical to the process of curiosity and discovery that must be at the heart of artistic creation.

    You write about your experience at Camp Armenia in Massachusetts, and how you were taught Genocide doctrines. What kind of an experience was that?

    The first thing I remember is sitting in the back of my family’s station wagon, reading David Kherdian’s novel for young adults titled ‘The Road from Home’. I read this book over and over again all the way to the camp, and all the way back, and cried. When I went to libraries when I was 10 I sought out Genocide memoirs and read them. I felt very clear about the fact that Turkey was the enemy; it was the part of the air we breathed at the camp. One of the common reactions I get from Armenians after they have read the book is “We weren’t raised to hate Turks!”; but I don’t think they are being honest.

    You also openly write about many difficult issues, like commemoration events held for the Lisbon 5, the Armenian Revolutionary Army militants that killed Turkish diplomats; and you are quite outspoken about your criticism of Armenians; did you find it difficult to write about such incidents?

    I was very aware that people would be upset, but I also had no hesitation about being honest in writing about such issues. For me the only way that I can justify writing several chapters that are very critical about Turks is to also criticise my own community, my own experiences. If you are an Armenian and you are critical of Turkey, who is going to listen to you? Of course you’ll be critical of Turkey, you are not interesting, you are just another Armenian who is criticizing Turkey. We talk a lot about Turkey’s denial of the Genocide, but there is another kind of denial, and that’s denying the truth about how we behave and talk amongst ourselves. This book is a call to be honest; we have to talk about events like the Lisbon 5 commemorations, and about our own psychological state.

    There have been harsh reactions against you, and even calls for a boycott, what do you think about these reactions and the psychology that lies beneath?

    What astonishes me most is that they criticize me without even reading the book; they produce lies and invent scenarios; and even try to make it look as if I were opposed to the recognition of the Genocide. If they had read my book, they would see why I believe in the recognition of the Genocide, and the reasons I put forth for it. What makes them uncomfortable is that my reasons are not the reasons that I was raised with, and that they are different from the framework that Armenian nationalist groups define. They even called me a Turkish spy; a Jewish spy and they even accused me of being a self-hating Armenian because my surname doesn’t end with –ian. I was born with this surname, and my father was born with this surname.

    The voice of those people who are attacking me was in my ears for years, they created the environment I grew up in, and it was that environment that motivated me to write this book. Falsifications and accusations are the only problems that disturb me, because they take from me the control over the message the book wants to convey. By making such false accusations, they force me back into using their language to set the record straight.

    At one point I thought maybe I should place a banner at the top of my website, stating, “Important notice! I am not opposed to Genocide recognition! I just wanted to find my own reasons for believing in Genocide recognition, and to understand the impact of this issue on Armenian identity” -but then I said ‘Just leave it’. This book was a way to say “Don’t force me into your agenda.” If I posted such a notification on my website I would be trapped in that agenda again!

    What do you think about Erdoğan’s condolence message?

    I wasn’t expecting it.  I thought it was unsatisfying, but it has a constructive function. The text was very carefully written; but he said it after all, it was April 24, and he acknowledged that something had happened. Then again, it annoyed me when the New York Times ran an article, which made it sound as if he acknowledged the Genocide, because Erdoğan did not acknowledge the Genocide. But at the same time it annoys me when people dismiss it and treat it as if it were nothing. By contrast, the real emotional reaction I had was for the apology campaign IN 2008; that was something big for me.

    In Turkey, especially after 2007, a new social group emerged with a high awareness regarding the Armenian Question, and who proclaim, ‘Armenians are our brothers and sisters’. What is your view of this new discourse?

    Although some people mean well, I find this discourse fake and patronizing. We don’t need to be siblings or friends. Reconciliation means to having an honest discussion about different experiences and different prejudices around the same table. The book ends up being quite cynical, because I was getting frustrated with all this talk of “We are friends, we are brothers…”. Bringing together musicians from both countries is not reconciliation, it’s a nice thing, but it is not the end goal, it is just part of the process. The end goal here is a democratic society with freedom of expression, and an honest account of history.

    You also have a chapter on January 19, 2007. What does Hrant Dink mean to you?

    I met him in 2005; it was a brief meeting. I was looking for a language that would correspond to my feelings as an Armenian in the Diaspora. Being so focused on a country that you don’t know and don’t have any contact with, being so focused on Genocide as part of your identity, without questioning what had happened, it wasn’t easy to find an ethos that corresponded to such feelings. Meeting Hrant Dink was very important in the sense that he looked at the situation from a similar perspective, and openly said that this hatred running through the Diaspora is toxic and not constructive.

    Talking to Hrant Dink, and reading his articles gave me a sense of validation, and the sense that there is a way to talk about these things using a different language. He opened up a lot of new questions in my mind. 19 January 2007 was my last day at the New York Times, I was planning to travel back to Turkey soon after. But the moment I heard about his murder, my hopes took a kamikaze dive. Hrant Dink made strong statements that went against received knowledge, but he didn’t use hateful language. For a person as compassionate, openhearted and forgiving as he was to be assassinated, it is so painful…
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #74 - April 25, 2015, 12:31 PM

    Isn't the term anger?  I was brought up in an area where one would not buy Volkswagens.

    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #75 - April 25, 2015, 01:57 PM

    CBC radio interview with Meline Toumani, Nubar Alexanian and Levon Ichkhanian

    http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/borgen-armenian-genocide-listener-mail-robert-harris-on-the-great-american-songbook-1.3037372/legacy-of-a-genocide-1.3037448
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #76 - April 25, 2015, 02:14 PM

    I hope Turks in Germany protesting their government's recognition of the Armenian genocide are not considered to be "rising up in rebellion against their own government," "forcing it" to "relocate" them, during which regrettable though inevitable casualties might occur.

    That's how absurd the denialists sound to me.
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #77 - April 25, 2015, 09:30 PM

    Three of the fascinating things in wiki about this committee are that this revolution was forgotten because of the Russian and 1911 Chinese, that Turkey has become one of the most ethnically homogeneous regions in the world - there were plans to give coastal south west Turkey back to Greece after WWI - they had been since Alexander and before, and how the actual affinity of Greece and Armenians is with Russia, because they are all Orthodox.

    A democratic non Islamically based Ottoman region, basically allied with Russia, may be the way forward, a sort of new Roman Empire.

    But the Barbarians of Western Europe and now the Americas have forgotten that during the crusades they sacked Orthodox Constantinople, and the Russians are correct to be suspicious about the West, its main heretical religion catholicism and the West's  heretical sect of Catholicism, Protestantism.

    Surely there must be some diplomats who understand the intricacies here?

    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #78 - April 26, 2015, 08:51 AM

    But Turkey isn't one of the most ethnically homogeneous regions in the world. Some 20% of the population is Kurdish, and they have more children than Turks, so the Turkish share will decline. Religiously  some 15% of the population is Alevi, not Sunni.
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #79 - April 26, 2015, 02:38 PM

    Both Greeks and Armenians have "left" Turkey - it has become a lot less diverse than it was.

    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #80 - April 26, 2015, 02:44 PM

    I wonder if the effects of fascism and its related ideologies need to be mapped to twentieth century ethnic population changes, for example Jews from Egypt, Iran, and Iraq, as well as Armenians and Greeks.

    http://departments.kings.edu/history/20c/fascism.html

    Quote
    The term fascism comes from the word fasces; an ax tightly wound with sticks.  Fascism can be defined as a political attitude and mass movement that arose during time between the first and second World War.  Fascism is the attitude of giving full interest in economic, social, and military power to a dominant race or state lead by a single dominant leader.  Fascism basically rejected the idea of Socialism, Capitalism, and Democracy. Fascism’s are single-party dictatorships characterized by terrorism and police surveillance.  It focuses on ethnicity and “our” race being better than “your” race. Fascism isn’t limited to one culture alone.  Each culture can believe that it is better and each person can consider himself to be better than his fellow man. Fascism is used to categorize censorship and oppression.  Ones who take away freedom from others can be considered fascist.

                Several countries embraced fascism between World War I and World War II.  Some, such as Norway, Denmark, Great Britain, Belgium, and France, had large fascist movements.  Others, such as Spain, Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Poland, and Finland, gained substantially fascist governments.  Fascism had the largest effect on Italy and Germany.  The death toll due to fascism in Germany was the highest.  It was the Holocaust in Germany that was the most significant.  Other countries amounted significant losses of life due to secret police and the removal of unwanted ethnic groups.  Other fascist countries had a very small death toll, and others did no kind of ethnic cleansing at all.  Great Britain still had a fascist movement though, and a sizable fascist political party.  The amount of censorship and racism in Great Britain was small compared to Italy or German.  Poland was hardly a racist or censored country.  Poland had a government where the military ruled the people, and it had a fascist political party.  Poland was a fascist country to a certain degree.  Not all countries have to have an open, fascist, ruling government to be considered to have elements of fascism.  Many aspects of fascism are still around today.

                    The idea of fascism can never be wiped out because it is an idea.


    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #81 - April 26, 2015, 04:43 PM

    I guess it's worth quoting this again.

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/11/24/the-20th-century-dictator-most-idolized-by-hitler.html
    Quote
    The popular understanding of Hitler’s rise to power often points to the influence of Mussolini and his march on Rome. In fact, argues Ihrig, “the assumed role-model function of Mussolini, mainly deduced from the later significance of Fascist Italy, has led many authors to overestimate Italy” and as a result “few historians mention Atatürk as part of the general pre-putsch atmosphere.” In fact, as Ihrig points out, Mussolini called himself “the Mustafa Kemal of a Milanese Ankara” as he began his own power-grab.

    Ihrig argues that the two main Nazi papers, the Heimatland and Völkischer Beobachter, were promoters of the “Turkish methods” as early as 1921. The Nazis argued that brute force had been necessary for Turkey’s independence, and, insidiously, they highlighted Atatürk’s crackdown on ethnic minorities and all of those who dissented.  One Nazi ideologue, Hans Trobst, wrote explicitly about Turkey’s “national purification” of “bloodsuckers” and “parasites” like Armenians and Greeks; Trobst was later invited to meet with Hitler after the leader read his writings on Turkey. Ihrig notes that Hitler’s secretary wrote to Trobst in Hitler’s name, declaring, “What you have witnessed in Turkey is what we will have to do in the future as well in order to liberate ourselves.”

    This praising of Turkish aggression was laying the groundwork for Hitler’s Beerhall Putsch, in which he attempted, and failed, to seize power in Munich in 1923. It was only after it failed, Ihrig contends, that Hitler saw it as necessary to go a more “legitimate” political route like Mussolini. In his final speech at his trial, Hitler would also point to Atatürk (and then Mussolini) as examples of why his attempt at seizing power was not treasonous—it was, he said, for “the gaining of liberty for his nation.”

    A decade on, in 1933, Hitler would tell the Turkish daily Milliyet that Atatürk was, in his words, “the greatest man of the century,” and confess to the paper that in the “dark 1920s” “the successful struggle for liberation that [Atatürk] led in order to create Turkey had given him the confidence that the National Socialist movement would be successful as well.” Hitler called the Turkish movement his “shining star.” In 1938, on his birthday, Hitler would tell journalists and politicians that “Atatürk was the first to show that it is possible to mobilize and regenerate the resources that a country has lost. In this respect Atatürk was a teacher. Mussolini was his first and I his second student.”

    I'm not sure Ataturk and Kemalism were fascist exactly but they certainly belonged to the same family of radical nationalist movements and ideologies.
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #82 - April 26, 2015, 05:16 PM

    ...............A short radio interview with Meline Toumani   ............


     The end goal here is a democratic society with freedom of expression, and an honest account of history. ....Meline Toumani ......


    thanks for that post zeca..........

    Do not let silence become your legacy.. Question everything   
    I renounced my faith to become a kafir, 
    the beloved betrayed me and turned in to  a Muslim
     
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #83 - April 26, 2015, 05:41 PM

    Police intervene in 1915 commemoration ceremonies in Istanbul, 6 taken into custody

    http://www.todayszaman.com/national_police-intervene-in-1915-commemoration-ceremonies-in-istanbul-6-taken-into-custody_379035.html

    Robert Fisk - On an Istanbul street, have I just witnessed a positive step in history?

    http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/on-an-istanbul-street-have-i-just-witnessed-a-positive-step-in-history-10204966.html
    Quote
    A few hours before I sat down to write this article, I visited the tomb of Talat Pasha, the man who – in the eyes of those Armenians who survived his 1915 genocide – was Turkey’s Hitler.

    He lies beneath a grey stone sepulcher under a grey stone arch on the Hill of Eternal Liberty, opposite the Florence Nightingale Hospital in Istanbul. Nowhere is it indicated that his date of death, 1921, was set by an Armenian assassin’s bullet in Berlin. Nor is there the slightest clue that it was Adolf Hitler who sent the body of the Ottoman interior minister back to Istanbul on a steam train decorated with swastikas in 1943.

    Hitler hoped his gesture might persuade neutral Turkey to join the Axis side in the Second World War, which was a bit over-optimistic after the fall of Stalingrad. And the Turks, having lost their empire by backing Germany in the First World War, were not so stupid as to make a second fatal alliance with Berlin. But a Turkish friend has just sent me footage of the 1943 funeral in which Turkish troops can be seen taking this founding member of the Committee of Union and Progress to his grave on a gun carriage. I recognized at once the bleak little hill where I had been standing, with its independence obelisk – and noted the tall German military attache walking in the front row of the mourners, the ludicrously wide lapels of his Nazi dress uniform, his peaked hat decorated with eagle and swastika.

    Most of those responsible for the last century’s first holocaust – including Enver Pasha, shot dead in 1922, whose tulip-smothered grave lies a few hundred yards from Talat’s tomb - were murdered in Europe or Asia by a group of vengeful Armenians in what they called ‘Operation Nemesis’, the subject of a gripping new book by American-Armenian historian Eric Bogosian. The Jews of Europe were not the only ones to hunt down their persecutors after the genocide of their people.

    So what would these men have thought (let us have done with dead men ‘spinning in their graves’) if they could have watched, as I did last Friday night, a crowd of several thousand - perhaps 60 per cent of them non-Armenian Turkish citizens – standing to attention in honour of the Armenian dead of 1915 in one of Istanbul’s oldest streets? It’s rare that a journalist can report a happy story, however wicked its origins, and it’s unwise – as I did after the 2011 Egyptian revolution – to report, albeit with all the usual warnings, that this is a positive step in history.

    But in Istiklal Street on Friday, watching Armenians from around the world recalling their people’s genocide, one felt as if history, in its arcane, almost comical way, suddenly moved into the future. “First, I invite you to a new beginning,” an Armenian woman, Heghnar Zeytelian, said in Turkish over a loudspeaker. “…Let’s work together for justice.” Then another voice, that of Nigaghos Tavibian, in English. “This is where it started…This is where Talat gave his fateful orders and this is the country where remembering was forbidden for 70 years…modern Turkey should have been built on the culture of all its peoples….We look forward to a day when the people of this country will say: ‘1915 – Not in Our Name’.”

    The Turkish press, so used to adopting the same cowardly language as CNN and the BBC – that the planned extermination of the Armenians was “hotly disputed” by Turkey – printed the fearful word genocide more frequently than they did the usual gutless references to the “events” and “incidents” of 1915. And it was somehow pathetic that the best the Turkish state could do to wipe out the significance of the 24 April genocide commemoration was to falsify the date of its own sacred victory at Gallipoli by bringing it forward from 25th April. It made no difference. Putin shamed Obama by travelling to Armenia and called the 1915 mass murders a genocide.

    Having withdrawn its ambassadors from the Vatican and Vienna to spite the latest nations to recognise the truth, is Turkey now going to order home its ambassador to Moscow? But the rules have changed. For the first time, the Turkish state last week permitted the Armenian patriarchate in Istanbul to commemorate 1915 – no mention of the “genocide” word, of course – and sent one of its ministers to the service. Though insufficient for the Armenians, President Erdogan told them earlier that “I sincerely share your pain”.

    Non satis. To share pain, you must acknowledge truth. Which means genocide. When Turkish students at the Istanbul Technical University tried to commemorate 1915, campus guards attacked them with batons. And in the Armenian capital of Yerevan that same night of 24 April, in an act of profound stupidity, a group of youths set fire to a large Turkish flag in front of television cameras – thus proving to many Turks that the Armenians, far from seeking recognition of the genocide, still hated the modern-day people of the nation which tried to destroy their ancestors.

    But then on Sunday morning, I found myself sitting in an auditorium of the Istanbul Bogazici University, listening to academics from around the world — including Turkey — discussing the Armenian genocide without any frightened quotation marks around the word, describing the outrageous property transfer laws which allowed the Ottomans to steal the homes and possessions of dead Armenians in 1915, and recalling the forced removal of Armenian orphans.

    I interrupted my day, however, by visiting the military museum near Taksim Square. And there, in a glass case, I observed the shirt of Talat Pasha, still stained with the blood which poured from his head in the Charlottenberg district of Berlin on 15 March 1921 when Armenian killer Soghomon Tehlirian shot him in the base of the skull. Talat was not Hitler, of course. He was neither as efficient nor as fascistic as the Nazis. But he was a cruel man, still honoured in the land of his crimes.

    So it’s tempting to ask which will win: blood or words? I’ll take a bet on what I’ve seen these past three days. A brave Turkey will acknowledge the genocide of the Armenians – and the Armenians should help them. The day will come.


    The funeral of Talat Pasha
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ34TGq5AuE
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #84 - April 26, 2015, 11:43 PM

    Ajam Media Collective: remembering the Armenian Genocide through the culture that persists

    http://ajammc.com/2015/04/24/armenian-genocide-centenary/

    Houshamadyan: a project to reconstruct Ottoman Armenian town and village life

    http://www.houshamadyan.org/en/home.html
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #85 - April 27, 2015, 10:13 AM

    Turkish dancers for "peace" and Armenian genocide denial in Times Square NYC.

    http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/Default.aspx?pageID=447&GalleryID=2511#PhotoGallery

    The Turkish lobbying efforts seem so desperate and clumsy sometimes.
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #86 - April 27, 2015, 05:10 PM

    Statement from Bilgi University academicians against censorship of Genocide Conference

    http://www.agos.com.tr/en/article/11376/statement-from-bilgi-university-academicians-against-censorship-of-genocide-conference
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #87 - April 27, 2015, 05:56 PM

  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #88 - April 27, 2015, 06:17 PM

    You have to shake your head at the comment from Sabab. You'd think they'd be aware of Germany's recent comments doing just that.

    `But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
     `Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here. I'm mad.  You're mad.'
     `How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
     `You must be,' said the Cat, `or you wouldn't have come here.'
  • The Armenian genocide a hundred years on
     Reply #89 - April 27, 2015, 06:25 PM

    Actually I think the implication is that the allied side in WW1 had some responsibility for what happened. In a sense I think there's an element of truth in this. After all the rounding up of Armenians on April 24 1915 came on the eve of the Gallipoli landings. It's just that this doesn't lessen the Turkish responsibility in any way.
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