Outside of areas of Greek or Armenian control, there would be no ethnic cleansing or genocide.
Why? How would the annihilation of Turkey as an independent state lead to democratic consolidation in Germany, or to the abandonment of German claims in eastern Europe? What is the causal connection? If anything, the success of Italy in making its Anatolian claims work, and of Greece and Armenia in satisfying their maximal claims, would seek to set a precedent for Germany. The strong can take whatever they want.
Occupation zone like that would cost millions or billions the Italo-Anglo-Greco-French alliance doesn't have. The only zones that could see being taking away permantly might be the Greek claims like Costantinople/Istanbul and Smyrna/Izmir (but how the fuck would someone even think or imagine to defend what would be basically surrounded by an hostile state?) and historical Armenia as a compensation for the genocide; if they are lucky the Anglo-French controlled Kurdistane majority regions can get added to Syria and Iraq.
But that's about it.
But that's about it.
tonycat77
Banned
I love how we always got TL's like: "if we massacred all the x before ww2, no hitler so that would be good", like a indian /pol/ user claimed on his treatise about nuking pakistan: "self-defensive genocide", in this case, i like to think as "minority report genocide".
It's even more ironic that the username is based about a fictional character known for mass murder and enslavement of a occupied planet by a militaristic and very racist alien race in Star Trek DS9.
Like i said on the thread about liquidating the german czechs, that shit can't be hidden like the Holocaust or the USSR massacres under the veil of a totalitarian dictatorship amidst a war, with the actuall killings happening in far away places, with censorship and very few intel on it.
It would be broadcast across the world, you think the US was too isolationist in the 1920s?
Imagine their reaction when their wartime allies commit the same crimes that they convinced the public to go to war to stop it.
It's even more ironic that the username is based about a fictional character known for mass murder and enslavement of a occupied planet by a militaristic and very racist alien race in Star Trek DS9.
Like i said on the thread about liquidating the german czechs, that shit can't be hidden like the Holocaust or the USSR massacres under the veil of a totalitarian dictatorship amidst a war, with the actuall killings happening in far away places, with censorship and very few intel on it.
It would be broadcast across the world, you think the US was too isolationist in the 1920s?
Imagine their reaction when their wartime allies commit the same crimes that they convinced the public to go to war to stop it.
tonycat77
Banned
Erasing a entire race from a defeated major power is different.
Not even the Austrians tried to wipe out the Serbs like that.
Sure Armenia, Pontic Greeks, Arabs, they all were genocided, but not in this scale to what the OP is proposing.
I don't think taking proper Armenian land is defending the homeland. Nor is Western Anatolia truely Turkish. Not after they killed and expulsed anyone left there that isn't Turkic or Islamic.
On the other hand Attaturk inspired the Fascist movements that came later, but he really isn't connected to them personally per say.
Tbf the Greek, international and Armenian zones are tenable, as with French Cilicia. Italy taking anything more than Caria is insanity.
What you really need to pull this off is competing non-Turkish muslim identities. Anatolian Muslims would much quicker grab on a different ethnic identity than change religion.
How exactly you arrange that I don't know.
Alternatively, you make WWI end faster (intact Russia) but still have an as-bad-or-worse Armenian genocide. The victors might be less-than-graceful if they have the spare capacity to do anything about it.
How exactly you arrange that I don't know.
Alternatively, you make WWI end faster (intact Russia) but still have an as-bad-or-worse Armenian genocide. The victors might be less-than-graceful if they have the spare capacity to do anything about it.
What is it that makes the land "proper" Armenian land? Or what is it that makes Western Anatolia not "truly" Turkish? It certainly can't be the populations, which by the later 19th century were solidly Muslim, outside of smaller areas.
Personally, I think this is impossible. Though the Turks were a small ethnic group compared to those of Western Europe, they were a solidly large group with a fairly coherent identity. The closest anyone was come to managing to exterminate an ethnicity in this way we're the Nazis, and they failed even with the weight of centuries of anti-Semitic demonization on their side. They may find themselves politically dominated for a time, but they aren't getting exterminated without turning much of Western Civilization over to UberNazis.
Places like Lake Van had 50% Armenian populations in the early 20th century and in various other places they're the largest population of ppl in them if you count the Muslims in separate ethnic groups. So those places are majority Armenian before the genocide. Btw the numbers of Armenians became smaller and smaller because of active persecution nothing more and nothing less.
i wasn't aware ataturk continued the armenian genocide, and i thought western turkey was already turkified before the war
I don't recall @Quinkana doing THAT.
Ataturk's republic did even brought many of the genociders to court. Then they were pardoned though, but that was realpolitik.
While I have some concerns about Quinkana claim on Western Anatolia, I have some genuine doubts that your claim of 19th century eastern Turkey was Muslim, for the simple reason that Ataturk himself Turkified culturally many places and claiming they were Turkish. Hell, probably Ataturk himself wasn't fully Turkish!
What follows is my personal opinion, and is based on living for a prolonged time in Turkey and dating a Turkish girl from Eskeshir, and based on this article :
Why has Erdogan released the genealogy of thousands of Turks?
In 2003, the Armenian newspaper Agos, whose editor Hrant Dink was assassinated outside his office in 2007, reported that the Turkish government was secretly coding minorities in registers
web.archive.org
Now a coherent identity the Turks weren't until Ataturk actually came in.
And probably most Turkish people aren't 100% Turkish today either. You can see that someone from Adrianople, Izmir, Istanbul is VERY different from someone from Samsun or Trebizond or Lake Van, and vice versa.
After Brazil, the Ottoman Empire was probably the place where interracial marriage occured often (wheter how much it was consensual in many cases that's up to debate and it is not a can of worms I want to open).
Turkish identity is barely coherent to THIS day. And you can see also when Erdogan . Unless you talk to a Grey Wolf, but those are the Turkic equivalent of national-socialism and thank God they never became relevant enough to get to power.
I do think places like Smyrna are majority Greek as Ionia so you can't say that Western Anatolia is wholly Turkish too in the late 19th to early 20th centuries. Constantinople is a clusterfuck no matter who holds it.
Let's just say that after wiping out the Armenians from Western Armenia the Turks were rewarded with another slice of Armenia that clearly was not even Turkish before the war (it was Armenian or more precisely Russian). Which honestly is quite farcical given what they did in the preceding years. You could say that the Turks were punished with the loss of their empire, but I am pretty sure that is of very little consolation to the Armenians (and we could make a similar argument for the Greeks), who were killed/forced to leave their homes despite the fact that before the war said homes were far from the previous Ottoman border.
They were fairly substantial. Ten million people or so in the mid-1920s is comparable to the populations of ethnic Czechs in Czechoslovakia and ethnic Romanians in Romania, and is a substantially larger population than that of established European states like Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden. In a regional perspective, there were more than twice as many Turks as there were Greeks.
I definitely think it imaginable that Greece and Armenia might have done better, though I question whether their maximal territorial claims were ever viable.
Apologies for the wall of text! It's worth noting before this that I am not a Turkish Nationalist, or even a Turk, as I'm sure most of you know by now. And although I'm probably one of the prominent fans of the Ottoman Empire on the board, I'd like to think of my feelings toward the empire are tempered by the knowledge of the many atrocities committed by the Ottoman government, especially in the dying days of the empire.
Ataturk did not create the Turkish identity from scratch, though certainly he defined the modern definition of what a Turk is, and made the Turkish identity the primary one for what we would call Turks today as opposed to religious or regional identity as had previously been the case before the foundation of the Turkish republic. Primary sources such as the notes of late Ottoman Statesmen (Abdulhamid II himself, who was a pan-Islamist in terms of his policy rather than a Turkish Nationalist, asserted that the Turkish ethnic group was the basis of the Empire's strength), suggest that at least the elite considered there to be such a thing as a Turkish ethnic group.
As for some "racial" argument that Turks were not Turks because they were mixed... well is any race pure? As someone from one of the world's most racially diverse ethnic groups, the appearance of someone does not dictate their ethnic identity. Arabs can be black, white, or the more usual brown colouration. The fact that the Turks aren't the 100% racially pure Turkic steppe nomads of the imagination of crazed Turkish nationalists is irrelevant to the fact that a Turkish ethnicity does exist and indeed did exist at the turn of the 20th century despite its difference from its modern forms. And in terms of its coherence, a farmer from some impoverished village in Anatolia may have a completely different worldview from an educated urbanite living in Istanbul, but both would still identify as Turks.
Historiography has certainly overcorrected the previous "There was no Armenian Genocide because it was a deportation order that just happened to lead to the death of hundreds of thousands of Armenians and the destruction of the substation Armenian population of Western Anatolia", but let's not be too quick to jump into a view that sees the Turks as uniquely evil. The Turkish Nationalists in the CUP had a very "us or them" mentality that had partially been created by the ethnic cleansing of Turks and other Muslim peoples in the Balkans, which Greece had participated in as well, even if it was to a lesser extent than the Serbs. The war years saw the ethnic cleansing of peoples across Anatolia and the Balkans, and the Turks were unique perhaps only in the scale of their destruction (the Armenian nation suffered far more than the Turkish, Greek, Azeri, etc), and perhaps in the role of planning at the top of the Ottoman State in the persons of the 3 Pashas.
Yes, a few Sanjaks did have an Armenian majority, and dividing the Muslims into various ethnic groups would leave the Armenians as a plurality in many more places. But at that point, it is playing around with numbers to avoid acknowledging the fact that Muslims were a solid majority in Eastern Anatolia. Dividing the Muslim population obscures the fact that until the onset of modern Turkish Nationalism in the 1920s, the Muslims were more likely to identify by religion as opposed to ethnicity, and the fact that the Ottoman census counted Muslims as a single group further complicates things. Nevertheless, it disproves an assertion that the land was "proper Armenian land", as Eastern Anatolia was ethnically diverse. And the Armenian population was increasing overall until the Armenian genocide, in spite of persecution from the authorities and intercommunal conflicts.
Kemal Karpat, who did the authoritative study on the population of the late Ottoman Empire, reports that only in Van was the Muslim population lower than the Armenian one. Traditional accusations of the undercounting of Christians aside, looking at the official figures of the Ottoman Census before the Hamidian Massacres reveals that when the Turkish and Kurdish populations were combined (as the Ottoman Census did), Muslims were the majority across Eastern Anatolia as a whole, even if there were small areas in which they were the minority.While I have some concerns about Quinkana claim on Western Anatolia, I have some genuine doubts that your claim of 19th century eastern Turkey was Muslim, for the simple reason that Ataturk himself Turkified culturally many places and claiming they were Turkish. Hell, probably Ataturk himself wasn't fully Turkish!
What follows is my personal opinion, and is based on living for a prolonged time in Turkey and dating a Turkish girl from Eskeshir, and based on this article :
Why has Erdogan released the genealogy of thousands of Turks?
In 2003, the Armenian newspaper Agos, whose editor Hrant Dink was assassinated outside his office in 2007, reported that the Turkish government was secretly coding minorities in registers
Now a coherent identity the Turks weren't until Ataturk actually came in.
And probably most Turkish people aren't 100% Turkish today either. You can see that someone from Adrianople, Izmir, Istanbul is VERY different from someone from Samsun or Trebizond or Lake Van, and vice versa.
After Brazil, the Ottoman Empire was probably the place where interracial marriage occured often (wheter how much it was consensual in many cases that's up to debate and it is not a can of worms I want to open).
Turkish identity is barely coherent to THIS day. And you can see also when Erdogan . Unless you talk to a Grey Wolf, but those are the Turkic equivalent of national-socialism and thank God they never became relevant enough to get to power.
Ataturk did not create the Turkish identity from scratch, though certainly he defined the modern definition of what a Turk is, and made the Turkish identity the primary one for what we would call Turks today as opposed to religious or regional identity as had previously been the case before the foundation of the Turkish republic. Primary sources such as the notes of late Ottoman Statesmen (Abdulhamid II himself, who was a pan-Islamist in terms of his policy rather than a Turkish Nationalist, asserted that the Turkish ethnic group was the basis of the Empire's strength), suggest that at least the elite considered there to be such a thing as a Turkish ethnic group.
As for some "racial" argument that Turks were not Turks because they were mixed... well is any race pure? As someone from one of the world's most racially diverse ethnic groups, the appearance of someone does not dictate their ethnic identity. Arabs can be black, white, or the more usual brown colouration. The fact that the Turks aren't the 100% racially pure Turkic steppe nomads of the imagination of crazed Turkish nationalists is irrelevant to the fact that a Turkish ethnicity does exist and indeed did exist at the turn of the 20th century despite its difference from its modern forms. And in terms of its coherence, a farmer from some impoverished village in Anatolia may have a completely different worldview from an educated urbanite living in Istanbul, but both would still identify as Turks.
I'm not quite sure what point you are trying to make here. Certainly, the Turks did particularly well from the genocides and ethnic cleansing that characterised the 1914-1924 period, but they weren't the only ones to benefit. The Azeri population of modern-day Armenia was destroyed as thoroughly as the Armenian population of Eastern Anatolia was.
Historiography has certainly overcorrected the previous "There was no Armenian Genocide because it was a deportation order that just happened to lead to the death of hundreds of thousands of Armenians and the destruction of the substation Armenian population of Western Anatolia", but let's not be too quick to jump into a view that sees the Turks as uniquely evil. The Turkish Nationalists in the CUP had a very "us or them" mentality that had partially been created by the ethnic cleansing of Turks and other Muslim peoples in the Balkans, which Greece had participated in as well, even if it was to a lesser extent than the Serbs. The war years saw the ethnic cleansing of peoples across Anatolia and the Balkans, and the Turks were unique perhaps only in the scale of their destruction (the Armenian nation suffered far more than the Turkish, Greek, Azeri, etc), and perhaps in the role of planning at the top of the Ottoman State in the persons of the 3 Pashas.
Certainly, they could have done much better. The coastal areas of Western Anatolia could have been held and perhaps fully Hellenized eventually (I trust we all know what this would entail) and without the genocide, the Armenians could have taken a good portion of Eastern Anatolia. To do so on their own however would have been an enormous task. If countries such as France, Britain and Italy had been more willing to implement the Sevres Treaty (difficult in light of the situation back in Britain and Italy especially), it could have certainly been done and eventually, the limitation of Turkey to a much smaller portion of its current territory could have been pulled off. But upon the Turkish entry into the war in 1914, I'd put perhaps a 20% chance of this actually occurring simply due to the demographic imbalance that favoured Muslims in Anatolia.
I was not trying to say you are and there is no need to justify a liking for Ottoman history. What I was trying to do was to answer your question “What is it that makes the land proper Armenian land?”, itself a counter to Quinkana “taking proper Armenian land”.
When it comes to Ottoman Armenia there is no doubt that that land politically was part of the Turkish empire. At the same time it was also a land inhabited by Armenians and others. In a way the Turks were trying to defend the status quo here, both during and immediately after WWI (although that came at the obvious expense of the local Armenians). But when it comes to the land annexed by Turkey from Russia (basically the area around Kars), we can’t call this Turkish land that Ataturk and Co. were defending from the Western powers who were trying to dismantle the empire. Unless you want to argue that this was Russian land, I think the best way to refer to it is as part of the Armenian homeland (at least at the time) where the Turks literally had no business being for the sake of defending their own nation from the West. It simply adds insult to injury that the Turks successfully profited from the liquidation of the local Armenian population in their own territories and the proceed to export this model to their consolation prize, to the point where we now question whether this was actually Armenian land.
That said (hopefully my message is much more clear now, I was focusing on the chunk of non-Ottoman Armenia that ended up as part of the new Turkish republic), I want to make clear that I am not in support of the “idea” in this thread to send all the Turks packing to rump Turkey. First of all, it would be a disaster. Second of all I don’t see the rational in the Italians, French and British doing so. And Armenia is ludicrously too big on the map to expect an ethnically homogeneous country that is not just empty. The only one that might work is Greece, since more Greeks left Anatolia compared to Muslims who left Greece. As long as Greece does not get too crazy with territorial demands of course.