Armenian Genocide.

[Seattleite]

The Armenian Genocide: THE most debateable use of the word "genocide", the most debatable body count in a "genocide", and the most misinformation from deceptive phrasing to twisted statistics and outright lies (on *both* sides, which is especially frustrating) in any historical event of the modern era. And let's face it, at this point nobody honestly knows what actually happened and there's almost no evidence other than a lot of bodies (mostly Turks, not Armenians, figure that one out) and a lot of comtradictory accounts with no backing. And yet, people get EXTREMELY heated over it.

 

So... Been too long since we had a good flame war. Discuss. I'll be watching from my hunker for safety's sake.

[rliant1864]

>mostly Turks, not Armenians, figure that one out

 

Who the hell told you that?

[Vapymid]

Nothing debatable here at all...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide

Lots of people got killed in an organised way and based on ethnic identity - and that isn't even denied any anyone. Even if you call it a "Sunday School Picnic" it won't change the essence of what's happened. So, nothing to see here, move along...

 

Regards

[Seattleite]

1. Wikipedia is not a source.

 

2. Even your only source admits nobody was actually killed. They were forcefully deported and died in transit or on arrival. If that counts, we should be upset by the ongoing "Hispanic Genocide", as most of the people the US deports to central America die. But nobody calls that a genocide, do they? Hell, nobody even calls the forced relocation of most native tribes (which killed far more people, and many more were directly and deliberately killed in the process) a genocide.

 

3. There was also no intent to destroy the armenian people. All of the killing was done strictly to get rid of political oppositiom to the new cunts in charge, and it is debateable if the killing was even deliberate since they died of natural causes in travel or on arrival. If that counts, then let's talk about Joseph Stalin committing a "Soviet Genocide" when he killed over ten times as many people for equally political reasons, with far less ambiguity of intent.

 

4. The "Mostly Turks" part refers to there being 850,000 dead armenians dead from all causes in that period (there in no evidence the other 650,000 ever existed, because *all* the data comes from before and after CENSUS information and the census says the Armenians in Turkey went from 950,000 to ~100,000), but in that same period 2.5 million Turks were *killed*. Because the target was groups thought to pose a political threat, regardless of ethnicity, the Muslim Turks just thought that all Christians (and Armenians were mostly Christians) qualified. So if we must call it a genocide (we'd need to call a whole bunch of other things genocides too, you would be buried under all the fallout), we can at least be honest and call it the "Ottoman Genocide" or something.

 

Really, there's nothing about this whole, frequently repeated narrative that holds up to scrutiny. Not even the name. Now, if you want to twist the definition of genocide until it fits, I'm game. But the name has to go, and twisting the definition to fit adds new genocides in the US, Mexico, Central America, eastern Europe, China, North Korea, every single nation on the continent of Africa, and many more around the world that don't occur to me right now. Many of which were MUCH worse, but nobody calls genocides for some reason.

[rliant1864]

1. Says the person who brought no sources.

 

2. So putting people on death marches and labor battalions doesn't count as murder? Hm, well, looks like we can substract several million deaths from the Holocaust now that those deaths don't count.

 

3. The goal was the total removal of the Armenians one way or the other. That's the point of forced deportation. And the idea that the political leadership didn't know that forced marches and labor would result in death is laughable. Do you honestly believe that the entire Turkish leadership was that stupid?

 

4. The persecution of the Muslim population was never perpetrated by the Turkish government. This was by foreign nations during the dissolution of the Empire. It's tough to call it a genocide because the deaths were not coordinated. Most died as refugees from wartorn areas, or from combat in those areas. This is very different from death on forced marches, deportation camps, and labor units.

 

It's laughable to say that the word genocide doesn't fit. Lemkin created the word to describe the Armenian genocide.

[Vapymid]

...nobody was actually killed. They were forcefully deported and died in transit or on arrival.

 

Talking about twisting definitions. They were not killed - they were forced to die?

 

Well, I don't think this "debate" will be productive... Better not try playing "sea lawyer"...

 

Regards

[Seattleite]

1. Dude, I'm just using this to get at a point about the word "genocide". I only have to play Devil's Advocate here for another, like, five minutes.

 

2&3. There's still precedent here. Stalin, the Kims and FDR *all* put minorities perceived as political opponents into prison camps where many died. Not one of them has ever had their actions called "genocide". As for the death marches, the US has done that a LOT throughout its history, and never had it called genocide.

 

4. I wasn't talking about the Muslim population, I was talking about the persecution of Turkish Jews, Christians and Pagans, Atheists and political opponents of the current establishment. And the simple fact is that not only did the Turkish government kill non-Armenian minorities, it killed members of the majority that vocally disagreed with them as well, and they killed several times as many non-Armenians as they did Armenians. So the name is just wrong on the "Armenian" end. But it's the other end that's important here.

 

Let's take a good, hard look at the word "genocide". If the term was used right and what was done to the armenians qualified, then there's a LOT of things that need to be added to the list. The US sending Guatemalan immigrants back to be systematically murdered in their home country is participating in a genocide, the US internment of Japanese-Americans killed many of the people interned and would be considered an abortive genocide, what the US, British and Spanish did to the natives of North and South America would be the single biggest genocide in human history. What Stalin did to his people? Genocide. What Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-Il and Kim Jong Un have been doing to their people since the 1950s is an ongoing genocide. So then, why are NONE of these things considered genocide? What distinction do they ACTUALLY have from the Armenian Genocide that makes it a genocide and them not?

 

Yeah, I can sum up the entire reason the Armenian Genocide is called a genocide by most countries but not by the one that committed it or its allies, and the reason none of those on that list are ever called genocide by anyone. Political convenience.

 

That's it. The term genocide is used when it's politically convenient for the people using it, and not used when it is politically inconvenient. The Armenian Genocide is recognized by 26 countries because it is politically convenient for them to show support to the Armenian people. It is not recognized by Turkey because admitting a genocide, even a hundred years gone, would reflect poorly on them and Turks are big on national pride. The US doesn't recognize it as a genocide either, not that you knew that part, because Turkey is an ally and it doesn't want to anger them. The reason the US doesn't admit it's been complicit in the Guatemalan Genocide is because it would cause outrage (not that it hasn't already), and it would remind people what the "good old days" of the US was really about (RACISM in all capital letters) and how shitty it really was to admit that the Japanese Internment was taking steps towards genocide. Admitting that the US was a huge part and the last actor for over a hundred years in the single greatest genocide in human history, the genocide of the native Americans, would be politically inconvenient. And as for the genocides under the dictators of the Soviet Union, North Korea and China? That's equal parts not giving a fuck about their people and not wanting to upset three current major world powers (the Russian Federation might not be the USSR, or even close to it, but it doesn't recognize the genocide).

 

So, if the term can be used entirely based on political convenience, and its dictionary definition is so nebulous that it can be applied to things as small as the Charleston Church shooting, does the term really have meaning anymore? I, personally, think the word "genocide" itself should be retired because it was a poorly defined term and now only serves political ends. And that's my actual point.

[rliant1864]

2/3. Political enemies aren't an ethnic, religious, national etc. group.

 

4. I'm still not sure where you got these facts from. Most of the leaders of the CUP's enemies ended up in exile, not death. The commoners who actively resisted engaged in war, e.g. the Greek conflicts.

 

This whole bit is primarily based on you gaining your knowledge of what 'genocide' means and where it should be applied from news outlets and opinion pieces. It's like learning what 'fascism' means from Tea Party forums.

 

Let's look at the actual definition of genocide according to the UN, written by Lemkin himself, the who coined the term:

 

...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

 

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

© Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

 

That's what defines a genocide.

 

The Turks engaged in genocide by covering A, B, C, and D to an extent. A and B were performed by the assigned gendarme without punishment, C was directly ordered by the government with their death marches, labor battalions and the deliberately horrible conditions of the deportation centers, and D...well, let's just say that rape and murder go together when you're a Turkish rear line gendarme.

 

North Korea doesn't fall into this because 'political enemies' are not one of the defined groups, because political enemies can be extremely diverse. America with the Japanese does not, because the intention was not to destroy them, and conditions were kept at an adequate level, even if not 'Maui hotel' nice. America with the Native Americans counts because A-E were performed many times in America's subjugation of the natives. The Charleston Church shooting REALLY doesn't count because it doesn't even come close to touching the definition.

 

Instead of this 'the news and politicians are playing games with us' thing, how about you go by the definition of the act? By the definition of the act, what the Ottomans did to the Armenians during the first world war was genocide. Textbook definition (it inspired the creation of the term, after all). Case closed.

[Seattleite]

Let's look at that definition. A definition I was already aware of and have read.:

 

A. Technically, any time you kill anybody, this would make it genocide. That's absurd.

B. And now torture. Even more absurd. Also, this is the definition used by rednecks to claim "white genocide" is a thing. Which it is not. Any overhaul of the term worth a damn would strip this one out of it.

C. Now prison counts, too. Jim Crow = African American Genocide? I think not.

D. Okay, got nothing for this one. Not that it can't apply to small scale crimes, but I just can't think of any examples.

E. So, if I took all the children out of northern Nigeria and moved them to the US, that'd be considered genocide by this definition. Can't say I at all care for the existence of definition E.

 

The problem is "part of the group" is too nebulous, and allows this kind of political abuse. Add a percentage or something, and it'd be better off. But the way it's used now renders it worse than useless, and redefining the term would not have an effect for many years and possibly not at all. It's time to retire it.

[rliant1864]

You have to hit several of them. Murder, torture, prison and abduction only cover 1 point each.

[Seattleite]

Prison is two of them, sometimes three, four and occasionally five. So then, do we count Jim Crow, the concerted effort to put as many black people in jail as humanly possible, as an act of genocide? Because technically it fits. But using the same term for Jim Crow as you use for the Holocaust just seems wrong. And even outside of prison, you can hit all the marks with a small group and many people have. The term is too loose, and only exists now as a buzzword for politicians to exploit.

[rliant1864]

>Prison is two of them, sometimes three, four and occasionally five.

 

Imprisonment isn't done with intent to destroy any one group. That's as important as the method, if not more so.

 

>But using the same term for Jim Crow as you use for the Holocaust just seems wrong.

 

How it feels doesn't matter.

 

Jim Crow also wasn't made with the intent to imprison, it was made with the intent to segregate.

 

>The term is too loose, and only exists now as a buzzword for politicians to exploit.

 

Everything is a buzzword for politicians to exploit. Ignorance and cynicism don't make something actually useless as a term.

[Selfsurprise]

The thing about arguing semantics about the precise of definition genocide, ethnic cleansing, etc and trying to justify things such as autonomic historical dissidence/holocaust denial is that it's kind of futile and kind of petty. Is the intentional systematic mass killing of people somehow more inhumane than the apparently unintended/non-systematic mass killing through willful mismanagement or mistreatment? Are you trying to argue that the latter is somehow less immoral and less of an atrocity?

[Fric]

 

2. Even your only source admits nobody was actually killed. They were forcefully deported and died in transit or on arrival. If that counts, we should be upset by the ongoing "Hispanic Genocide", as most of the people the US deports to central America die. But nobody calls that a genocide, do they? Hell, nobody even calls the forced relocation of most native tribes (which killed far more people, and many more were directly and deliberately killed in the process) a genocide.

 

So its a debate about a definition? In my book if a lot of people die due to the actions of oppressive regimes just because they are "the wrong nationality" or in other means "not trustworthy (read it as not obeying without question and stay in their place)" its a genocide. People are very sensitive with these subjects (so am I...), I guess no one wants to say the word genocide, because than its automatically associated with holocaust (holocaust is basically genocide of jewish people) or other big genocides/civil wars in Africa for example. Oppressive regimes do horrible things. Luckly my closest family hasn't experienced but I have family friends who experienced USSR deportations from multiple eastern Europe countries in 1941 and 1949. Yes, people weren't executed and thrown in mass graves, but does putting people on cattle trains like animals and sending to Siberian work camps just because they were part of the local national intelligence, new land owners (farmers), political activists etc. sounds "normal"? Also their families and small children, and don't giving two fucks who dies on the way from starvation/illness/cold. It might not be classified as genocide, but it was a delibarate attempt to get rid of unwanted people in the newly occupied territories, which depends a lot on nationality.

 

As for Ottomans - well, Armenians weren't the only ones - Greeks and Assyrians also suffered. So I wouldn't call it a one time thing that might be "misinterpreted". And if we look at history - Ottomans have generally been an aggressive and invasive regime. Oh btw don't forget about Cyprus. I bet dict... sorry I meant president Erdogan would love to rename Turkey the Ottoman Empire...

[Seattleite]

Listen, I am done with this discussion. I picked a pretty horrible way to make my point, and it's clear no amount of talking about it or even explicitly saying what my point is, which I've done a couple times now, will result in anybody getting it, or even getting what "it" is.

 

My entire point is that the way the word is used makes it worse than useless, and any use of the word today is destructive. It's used entirely to generate political advantage, its actual stated definition is NEVER followed and none of the people using it actually know what it means. It only ever destroys any hope of a rational discussion when you use it, as a result of the corruption of its definition and the violent, irrational knee-jerk reaction most people have to it. It doesn't even matter whether it actually applies to the topic or not, the moment the word is used to describe it there's no hope of the discussion going anywhere productive. It should NEVER be used.

 

It's not even close to the only word that applies to, but before I started this thread I had just been forced to listen to a guy ramble on for TWO HOURS about his "white genocide" conspiracy theory bullshit, but then immediately have the audacity to claim white people have never committed genocide, and go so far as to claim the only genocides in history were committed against white people. (He counts Armenians as white, for the record.) Of course, he was an old white man, a republican, and was watching Fox News while he rambled incoherently on the topic. And I was stuck there, listening to this clueless fucking cunt run his inbred fucking mouth until my ride arrived, and the closest I could get to avoiding the discussion was to keep my mouth shut and let him do his thing.

 

I was pretty fucking pissed off when I made this thread. And I realised once I calmed down that it didn't effectively make the point I was going for, and stopped posting. Now can we all go back to pretending this thread doesn't exist, please?

[BTGBullseye]

Now can we all go back to pretending this thread doesn't exist, please?

Wait, this is a thread? I thought it was a hamster... Possibly a fruit bat. No, wait! It must be a dump truck! That's it, a Tonka Dump Truck! Not the new-style plastic crap, but the old need-a-tetanus-shot steel ones that never die.

[Jeb_CC]

Watch it, BTG...