The Ottomans had completed the Armenian Genocide long before anyone knew who would win or lose WW2.
Well...
@BlondieBC is right.
The Ottomans had completed the Armenian Genocide long before anyone knew who would win or lose WW2.
Well...
I agree that with the Ottomans remaining neutral, they'd be still there - at the end of WWI.
Now the really interesting question would be if they can keep the empire together even absent that external pressure. They had been picked at the edges by all comers, and they were creaking along in any case. So, I wonder.
Especially if we assume that with the Russians faring better, WWI is one or two years shorter, then colonial powers like Britain, France, and Italy might be less war-weary, cash-strapped and manpower-depleted; Czarist Russia itself would still be in the game, too.
The straits aren't closed until September 27 to merchant ships. So the blockade doesn't have to happen The Ottomans have choices- they just made bad ones
Normality is not a factor, nor should it be presented as some kind of acquittal: an edict was authored, signed, and executed. An edict that resulted in death and destruction, in the near-complete eradication of an entire culture.I respectfully disagree.
Many people who participate in genocide are otherwise very 'normal' people. It's absolutely a what the fuck . . . moment. This was true with the genocide in Rwanda, Cambodia in the '70s, and Nazi Germany.
If we look at things like bystanders who don't easily and comfortably speak up, then we might be starting to find about ways to prevent genocide. I mean, I view it like first aid. If people just have the skills, it gets the odds much more in our favor. In the Nazi Holocaust, the persons who were righteous gentiles and took risks to protect Jewish persons often acted for reasons hard to explain even to themselves, just like the people who passively went along.
It was a direct result of Enver Pasha's horrible handling of the Caucasus Campaign, however. Ultimate victory or defeat aside, it happened at that particular time as Enver Pasha needed a scapegoat to cover for his incompetence and the Ottoman army's poor performance against the Russians. Avoid a Turkish entrance into the war or have them be better prepared and led (actually have boots and modern equipment, not have a self-dubbed military genius lead 90,000 men to disaster) and the genocide doesn't happen at that point (or perhaps ever, depending on the circumstances afterwards). Since the latter is far harder to achieve, just having the Ottomans sit the war out would be the quickest answer to OP.The Armenian Genocide is largely over in mid 1915. It was not clear who would win WW1 until the USA entered the war.
Normality is not a factor, nor should it be presented as some kind of acquittal: an edict was authored, signed, and executed. An edict that resulted in death and destruction, in the near-complete eradication of an entire culture.
It was a direct result of Enver Pasha's horrible handling of the Caucasus Campaign, however. Ultimate victory or defeat aside, it happened at that particular time as Enver Pasha needed a scapegoat to cover for his incompetence and the Ottoman army's poor performance against the Russians. Avoid a Turkish entrance into the war or have them be better prepared and led (actually have boots and modern equipment, not have a self-dubbed military genius lead 90,000 men to disaster) and the genocide doesn't happen at that point (or perhaps ever, depending on the circumstances afterwards). Since the latter is far harder to achieve, just having the Ottomans sit the war out would be the quickest answer to OP.
All the same, I still like the first aid model.Normality is not a factor, nor should it be presented as some kind of acquittal: an edict was authored, signed, and executed. An edict that resulted in death and destruction, in the near-complete eradication of an entire culture.
Yes, point well taken. Adolf Eichmann was not a frothing villain, but rather a boring bureaucrat. He conformed to the system he found himself in. In philosopher Hannah Arendt's phrase, "the banality of evil."You might need to look over this:The point is in that while an edict was completed out, it's just a matter of figuring out what is the problem on dealing with this.
But yeah, there still needs to be accountability.
I disagree that preventing WW1 will necessarily prevent the Armenian Genocide. The actual causes of the genocide are much deeper. You can change how the genocide is conducted and the scale (arguably changing whether it is a genocide or an ethnic cleansing, but I don't think that distinction matters for this discussion) but unless you find a way to prevent Turkish nationalism and the Ottoman state seeing religious minorities as dissident you aren't going to change the fundamental cause.
And we can turn this around, and ask how did something pretty bad stay at the level of pretty bad, and presumably peter out and not become genocide?. . . The Hamidian massacres of 1894-6 for example. . . .
Sometimes I think two threads work out very well.