United Armenia

- Bolshevik Russia was allied with Kemalist Turkey against “Western imperialism” – it was definitely not allied with the “puppet state of Western imperialism”: Armenia.

Umm, I would assume that Joseph Dzhugashvili, aka Stalin, given the opportunity, would do the same thing - thus, in that case, you'd be blaming the Russians for everything - if living under the CCCP was bad enough. IIRC Georgians and Armenians were not the best of friends, despite both of them being Christian people. Stalin loved no one.

O, and BTW - Turkey HATED the CCCP with a passion, as did the Greek monarchy.
 

Valdemar II

Banned
I doubt very much that he's actually German - for starters, he uses the day-month-year system for dates, which is characteristically American. For that matter, I don't even know if he's the real author of this piece or if it's just a massive cut and paste job..

Personal I think he has made by taking dates out of wikipedia and changing them into a timeline, with the low qualitity of the timeline I really doubt it's a example of plagiarism.

Let's face it, it's a shit TL, even beyond its contentious subject. The POD is in WWI and yet everything afterwards just goes pretty much according to time. I pointed out a few other things that were wrong with it, and he basically lost it. If he can't take even the slightest criticism at all without blowing a gasket, then perhaps he's right - this isn't the right place for him.


Completely agree, his attack was out of line, and I don't think we needs members like him.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
he uses mm/dd/yy system, which is American. Germans, like rest of sensible world, uses dd/mm/yy system
That's what I meant to say, but I'm still nursing the headache I got from reading the extremely small italicized type.

At least we agree he's probably an American.
 
I wonder if the Armenians back home have as much love for their American cousins as the Irish do for the Irish-Americans?

Funny you should mention that...

I used to visit a few Armenian forums, and whilst the American Armenians generally were even more nationalistic than the Hayastantsis, the often conservative Hayastantsis occasionally accused the American Armenians of having abandoned their religion and values, while the American Armenians in their turn occasionally mentioned how backwards the Hayastantsis are...

I assume that the people on those forums are propably not representative for their respective communities, but I still wouldn't be suprised if the love between various different Armenian communities turns out to be not quite as great as one might expect.
 
Umm, I would assume that Joseph Dzhugashvili, aka Stalin, given the opportunity, would do the same thing - thus, in that case, you'd be blaming the Russians for everything - if living under the CCCP was bad enough. IIRC Georgians and Armenians were not the best of friends, despite both of them being Christian people. Stalin loved no one.

O, and BTW - Turkey HATED the CCCP with a passion, as did the Greek monarchy.

At first that wasn't so much the case, and the Soviets provided some assistance to the Turkish Nationalists. Later, as the fascist-ethnic-nationalist Kemalist ideology developed, as did the imperial aims of the Soviets, the relationship deteriorated very, very badly.

In the case of the Armenians, Turkey was the first country to recognize independent Armenia and sign a treaty of friendship with them - which Armenia immediately abandoned and invaded Turkey, trying to annex about a third of it, which they claimed as "theirs". If they had worried more about preserving what they had, you have to wonder if it would have been possible to avoid being swallowed by the USSR, which had a whole host of problems at the time. I would think the Kemalists would have viewed a friendly buffer state in the Caucasus as a plus.

Somehow, the Armenians and Muslims in Turkey have managed to get along very well - you may remember the national outrage at the Hrant Dink murder. There's something to be said for "moving on".
 

Thande

Donor
Personal I think he has made by taking dates out of wikipedia and changing them into a timeline, with the low qualitity of the timeline I really doubt it's a example of plagiarism.

Alright, I've been holding off posting my running-joke image until now, but I can't restrain myself any longer.

Polish-Armenian Conspiracy.jpg
 

Sargon

Donor
Monthly Donor
Has anyone reported this guy's blatant insults directed at people to Ian?

If not I've done it.

One wishes these controversial matters could be discussed with a little less vitriol. Still, as Thande says - Republican Thread Destroyer.


Sargon
 
At first that wasn't so much the case, and the Soviets provided some assistance to the Turkish Nationalists. Later, as the fascist-ethnic-nationalist Kemalist ideology developed, as did the imperial aims of the Soviets, the relationship deteriorated very, very badly.

. . . . . .

If they had worried more about preserving what they had, you have to wonder if it would have been possible to avoid being swallowed by the USSR, which had a whole host of problems at the time. I would think the Kemalists would have viewed a friendly buffer state in the Caucasus as a plus.

I agree with what you say, but IIRC Stalin was pretty much hostile to anyone who was not "Russian", even though he himself was Georgian. Remember how in WW2, under the pretext of collaborating with Germany, he managed to deport a lot of minorities to Central Asia and Siberia? In that case, I think it was pretty much an amplification of Georgian-Armenian relations at that time, only transplanted to the USSR. IIRC Georgians and Armenians were not the best of friends at that time, so I think Armenia pretty much lucked out by not having to go through the deportations to Siberia that a lot of other people, like the Crimean Tatars and Jews, went through (Birobidzhan anyone?) - and even his purges.

In fact, though I hate Wiki, I've been skimming it and if it it correct, even the Tsars didn't treat their minorities too well, either. We're all probably familiar with the pogroms aimed at the Jewish people in Russia, but I'm surprised at how brutal it was towards others. I don't know if there was something in the water in Moscow/St Petersburg, but man some of these Tsars were worse than Ivan the Terrible.

Abdul Hadi Pasha said:
Somehow, the Armenians and Muslims in Turkey have managed to get along very well - you may remember the national outrage at the Hrant Dink murder. There's something to be said for "moving on".

I agree.
 

Ibn Warraq

Banned
I don't think he's trolling, but it's a bit more complicated than that.

:confused: It was such a success, in fact, that after the war, the Turks sentenced the men who were responsible for it to death.

Let's face the facts here - even the most incorrigible Turkish nationalist will admit that there were massacres, that the deportation of Armenians from eastern Anatolia was a bad move, to put it lightly, and that the whole episode was one of the darkest periods in their history. They will stop at agreeing that the Turks deliberately set out to eliminate the Armenians, which brings us to our next sentence:

Anyone who has studied the history of the Turks and the Kurds would pause at the formulation of this sentence. The Kurds went against the Armenians for their own reasons - there was no love lost between them - and required no prompting from the Turks.

Turks and others who have actually bothered to comb through the morass of vitriol that has been wasted on this subject are hesitant to attribute genocidal intentions to the Young Turks at this time simply because there is absolutely no evidence that they intended to exterminate the Armenians. It is true that hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished during this time, due to massacres and famine, but so did Turks and Kurds who lived in the same region, and in equal proportions. It was a warzone in the frontier between two crumbling empires. I think these facts alone speak volumes.

The term "historic Armenia" is also deliberately (and misleadingly) vague. Historically, Armenia has not been ten times the size of its present day area since the days of Tigran the Great (83-69 CE - that's right, all of 14 years over two millennia ago). If the feverish dreams of the most irrational Armenian irredentist were to be granted, and Armenia extended over 300,000 km, that's a territory the size of the Philippines, and I'd be very surprised if Armenians composed a quarter of the population there before the Holocaust, if even that.

The author himself seems to acknowledge this with his final solution to ethnically cleanse eastern Anatolia of its undesirable (Muslim) elements:







and so on... I probably missed a few but my eyes are bleeding from the small type.

I found this amusing:



Two problems: to start with, the Dashnaks were just one party in a coalition government, albeit the majority. Second of all, the Armenians were undeniably being supplied and supported by the Russians.

I'm not quite sure what this entails. What were they confessing to themselves?

Pleasant for whom? The Turks or everyone else?

I just can't buy into some of these assumptions. This scenario seems even more dystopian than the OTL, if that's imaginable.

Good lord, you were actually able to read through everything he wrote. That had to be the most annoying font I've ever tried to read.

RCTFI
As for the case of what actually happened, I freely admit that I do not know enough about what happened to have a legitimate opinion in the matter. I like AHP quite a bit, after all. I have read some stuff on it, but I think I should refrain from commenting, since I haven't actually read that many original documents. It's just a little hard to find them, especially when you don't read Turkish!

Actually, being able to read Turkish, or at least modern Turkish wouldn't help you much. The original documents are all in Ottoman, which uses a completely diffent script. Attaturk decided to "westernize" the language and so by now very few people even in Turkey can still read and write in Ottoman.

Unfortunately because this subject has been so volatile, I'm not sure if a single major Middle Eastern scholar has written a book about the Armenian Ethnic Cleansing(that's the term I use which is much fairer than genocide). In fact, I'll go so far as to say that I doubt a book has been written on the subject by anyone who can read and write Ottoman. Bernard Lewis has been put on trial for denying the genocide, Stanford Shaw had his house or car(I forget which) blown up over it, and Justin McCarthy has written plenty of essays and made plenty of public appearances decrying it, but I don't think any of them every published any books that focused specifically on the Armenian Ethnic Cleansing. Of the scholars who I could find who have written of it, I'd be shocked if either Peter Balakian or Guenter Lewy can read or write Ottoman. The only one I could find who might is Taner Akcam, but looking at his educational history from wiki(I know, I know) I seriously doubt it. Also, to be honest Akcam comes across more as an activist/revolutionary employed by a college than an actual scholar.

It's one of the great shames, but for obvious reasons(see Lewis & Shaw) most Middle Eastern scholars try and avoid the subject. Also, I think younger scholars are becoming less and less likely to be able to read and write Ottoman.

I know it might seem odd for me to have found this out but I think it was last year, one since banned guy who's user namer escapes me got into a nightlong fight with myself, Calgacus, Leo and AHP over the AG and pissed me off because when I started quoting Bernard Lewis he started argueing that Lewis had been bought off by the Turks, was old(true but irrelevant and insulting) and had used to claim the genocide happened before the Turks threw him some dinner parties or something equally idiotic and it caused me to hunt down Lewis alleged claims the genocide occured. Needless to say the guy was wrong. IIRC, he also lied about another scholar, David Fromkin.

Abdul Hadi Pasha
I wouldn't call this guy a troll, just an extreme Armenian nationalist -

Actually, I suspect he's more likely a banned member who wanted to pick a fight with you. That seemed like way too much of a cut and paste job(my eyes still hurt from trying to read it) to be the work of a real Armenian nationalist as oppossed to the ghost of some banned member.
 
Irrespective of the guy being a rather bad tempered and bigoted fellow, he totally changed the middle east in 1920ish, yet had the US invade Iraq in 2003!?! :confused:
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
Irrespective of the guy being a rather bad tempered and bigoted fellow, he totally changed the middle east in 1920ish, yet had the US invade Iraq in 2003!?! :confused:
I know, right?

Fortunately we can thank him for getting Thande to unveil his masterpiece.
 

Markus

Banned
I think an explenation is in order for this new member.

Fritzchen, this site has a number of Turkish members, many of whom claim that the Armenian Genocide did not occur, or that if anything happened, then that it happened on a very small scale.

What a surprise! I´d like to point out that I know Germans (not from this forum) who think exactly the same about the Holocaust. Furthermore I´m a bit irritated by the casual denial and downplaying of mass muerder.
Yeah, the thread should be closed!
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
What a surprise! I´d like to point out that I know Germans (not from this forum) who think exactly the same about the Holocaust. Furthermore I´m a bit irritated by the casual denial and downplaying of mass muerder.
Yeah, the thread should be closed!
For a fuller historical treatment of the issue, I commend to you Steven Katz's The Holocaust in Historical Perspective.

To address what IW is saying, no one could write such a book because it would mean the end of their academic career. The topic is so contentious that it would immediately be translated into the political realm. Whoever wrote such a book would immediately become persona non grata to one or the other side and quite possibly experience attempts at intimidation, and threats of physical violence, as I and my entire department were not two weeks ago.

And, rightly or wrongly, who wants to be painted as a Holocaust Denier? Because, short of writing a book that endorses "Wilsonian Armenia," states emphatically that Turks eat babies, and sets the death toll at six million Armenians or higher, that's precisely what will happen. That is why I always use the term Armenian Holocaust, which was the term applied to the event at the time and which does not lend itself to the kind of legalistic semantic debates that the term "genocide" engenders. Having established that, I can then proceed to introduce my students to the debate - and all of its dimensions - without worrying that I'll be painted as the academic version of Mahmood Ahmadinejad.

The simple fact is that it is impossible to write such a book. It would necessarily be one-sided. The Ottoman archives are a matter of public record; my ex-gf is planning on conducting some research there this summer. The archives of the Dashnaks, however, are closed to the public, and the Dashnaks are unlikely to admit anyone proposing an examination of the evidence that does not meet their political ends. Until that changes, an objective, thoroughly researched book that addresses all the relevant sources simply isn't possible.

You people complain and grumble about PC, but this situation is a pretty clear cut example. If I were to write a book endorsing all of the Armenian claims, I would be feted and probably fast tracked in my career. Anything else would probably guarantee that I'll never see tenure.

And as for the whole "Watch out! They're going to come get you!" deal, give me a break. It's the same thing as Operation Sealion. This is a topic we've debated before, ad nauseum, and we happen to have a few members who are actually familiar with the issues involved. Anyone who wishes to bring up the debate would be well advised to simply go through the archives and look to see if it's still worth pursuing. The fact that this is acknowledged here, when it seems to me to be an article of common sense, does not mean that this issue is off-limits or that the forum is patrolled by Thought Police, it merely means that if you are intellectually lazy or have some sort of axe to grind, as this guy clearly is and does, you shouldn't expect the entire forum to swallow uncritically what you're selling.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
In fact, Markus is an unwitting example of this phenomenon. When confronted with a poorly crafted timeline detailing the ethnic cleansing (of Turks and Kurds) from a vast territory over a span of decades, whose author dismisses the very real and amply documented examples of massacres and deaths by disease and famine of Muslims in the same area at the same time, his first instinct is to compare the thread's *detractors* to German Holocaust Deniers (!!!) and lambast them for "casually denying and downplaying mass murder" (!!!!).

If this is the reaction one can expect, is there no wonder that the forum members offer a friendly "heads up" to whoever wants to broach the topic?
 
In fact, Markus is an unwitting example of this phenomenon. When confronted with a poorly crafted timeline detailing the ethnic cleansing (of Turks and Kurds) from a vast territory over a span of decades, whose author dismisses the very real and amply documented examples of massacres and deaths by disease and famine of Muslims in the same area at the same time, his first instinct is to compare the thread's *detractors* to German Holocaust Deniers (!!!) and lambast them for "casually denying and downplaying mass murder" (!!!!).

If this is the reaction one can expect, is there no wonder that the forum members offer a friendly "heads up" to whoever wants to broach the topic?

Stop being so melodramatic. Can this thread not be closed asap?
 

Markus

Banned
.. his first instinct is to compare the thread's *detractors* to German Holocaust Deniers (!!!) and lambast them for "casually denying and downplaying mass murder" (!!!!).

You realize Neo-Nazis use the same "arguments": far less were killed, they were to be deported and not exterminated, they died of diseases, got caught in the anti-insurgency operartions, the historians/media are not telling the truth...

Ohh, and throwing people into jail who say this was a genocide certainly does not improve the "critics" credibility.

Bye,

Markus
 
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