Because I have lived in a city with a large Armenian population for many years and have many Armenian friends, I know about The Genocide that took place during the end of the Ottoman Empire. 1.5 million Armenians that were mostly citizens of the Ottoman Empire. I watched a Netflix film last evening called The Promise . There are several films with the same title and this one deals with a love triangle with overtures of the discrimination and eventual genocide of the Armenian people. If you enjoy history as I do then books and pieces on this Holocaust would be interesting to you.
I knew about it, but I have never read a history of the occurrence. I know the Turks still hate the Armenians and the Kurds, but I don't really know the basis of that hatred. Religion?
@Lon Tanner When I started high school, I had Algebra I, taught by a kindly gent named Yeksigian. My Mother, when hearing his name, declared that it was Armenian. The guy was a great teacher. At first, many seemed to have difficulty with his name: he countered by saying, "Just say Yek- Sig- Ian. Always calm and collected, except once, one of the young hooligans to be found in almost any class finally got the "works". Yeksigian quietly said, "You. Get out." The delinquent merely rattled on, upon which the teacher arose, hit his desk smartly, and yelled in no uncertain terms to GET OUT! I really liked that guy. Frank
Yes, I know quite a bit about it for two reasons. First, I used to live in Turkey near what was once a large Armenian community. Second, one of our best friends when we lived there was an American serviceman whose father was born in the above-mentioned community. His father was a 12-year-old boy with younger siblings and a very sick widowed mother when they were rousted from their village and forced to march for days to the coast to be put on ships. He had to carry his mother on his back and try to keep his siblings together. Once when they were allowed to stop for a rest, he discovered that his mother had died. He wasn't allowed to bury her but he said a kind Turkish woman carried her away and vowed to him that she would make sure his mother's grave was blessed by a Christian. Needless to say, he was devastated to find out that his son was being stationed in Turkey.
One neighborhood that I lived in as a kid had Armenians, Greeks, Syrians and my people(Latvians). I heard about the holocaust.
There is a Left wing channel on You Tube from America called the TYT Its main presenter is a Turk called C Unger who denied this ever happened his co presenter is Ana Kaspirin and Armenian who defends him. There is a clip which I cant find on You Tube of some one asking why they called them selves TYT after theses murders. Think the link says a lot.
I read in horrifying detail about how the Turks tortured and slaughtered whole Armenian families at one time. In one example, the Turks would make bets on the gender of a child a pregnant Armenian mother was carrying, then slice her open and rip out the fetus in front of her family to settle the bet. This is just one of the horrors the Armenians suffered at the hands of the Turks, who carried out such cruelties in a laughing, festive manner. I don't remember the author of these horrors, but it was worse then anything I ever read that happened in the Nazi death camps or the Soviet Gulags. Hal
It has been reported but usually suppressed that Nazi soldiers guarding the Jewish often snatched small infants from their mothers, threw them into the air, and practiced bayoneting them as they fell back to the ground. Frank
Yes, I also read that the Japanese did the same to Chinese civilians in the 1937-38 Rape of Nanking, where up to 80,000 Chinese women were raped and murdered. Hal
The worst atrocities in human history were carried out by the Turks who wanted to eliminate the entire Armenian population. I was shocked to read of how the Turks murdered the Armenians, entire families at a time. Brutal Turkish gangs would bet on whether a pregnant Armenian woman's child was male or female, then cut her open to settle the bet. When entire towns were on a forced march to where they would be slaughtered, Turks would commit unspeakable tortures on the way, one of which I can't even retell. Hal
Here where I live in Fresno Ca. there is a large Armenian population and I first became aware of the Turk atrocities from my contact with them and later in reading about it.
@Hal Pollner My Freshman Algebra Teacher's name was "Yeksigian"; everybody had trouble pronouncing it, so on the fiotrst day of class he explained: "Yek,....Sig,....Ian.....easy as that. My Mother, astute observer of ethnicity, told me he is Armenian; l later learned many Armenian names ended in "ian", which means "son of".......Yeksigian was a great Math teacher, easy to understand, firm and no nonsense. He once threw a young hoodlum out of the room by suddenly standing up, pointing at the door, and raging "GET OUT!". Frank
I have been thinking of racism lately. Not just here. The Truks were definitely cruel racists. It is a common evil and I am not sure what can be done even in this day and age to stop it. IMHO BLM is divisive and sometimes people worry it will be reverse racism. I much prefer urbancare.com to help people of color get what they want and need. The funny thing (not haha) that is not taught about slavery in America is that the continent of Africa maintained many warring tribes. The winners of skermishes took the prisoners who survived to the coast to sell to the Europeans! Whites were not hardy enough to handle the diseases and terrain to make it worth their while to venture too far inland, I would think. Black on Black warfare produced the slaves that were brought to the new world. As horrible as slavery was, there is more to the story than was told. The powerful taking advantage of the weak. And we did. What we did to the American Indians as atrocious. It was not as depicted in the westerns of our childhood. The Nazis and the Jews. War atrocities! China and Japan. C China now harvests organs from imprisoned pacifists. Bullying happens in schools. It is like racism. Someone is different. Let's pick on him.
I was in on multinational war games during the '70's. We did a couple of exercises with Turkish Marines. Wow, these guys are intimidating! I have no doubt that they would relish holding you down and plucking out your eyeball.