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Comment by gefh | Hacker News Reader

Sliding? More like rushing full throttle. Ataturk would be disgusted.

What makes reddit and now HN think Ataturk was some sort of beacon of democracy?

> In January 1920, Mustafa Kemal advanced his troops into Marash where the Battle of Marash ensued against the French Armenian Legion. The battle resulted in a Turkish victory alongside the massacres of 5,000–12,000 Armenians spelling the end of the remaining Armenian population in the region.

He finished off the Cilician Armenians from Anatolia, whoever was left under French protection and had escaped the Genocide.

It was war not genocide

It was a pure genocide!

"Say hi to Anatolia" go read it, always two sides to a story.

also THE ARMENIAN ALLEGATİONS AND FACTS

Which funnily enough returns this as the first result https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide_denial

Ah yes, like the holocaust was just war ...

It seems there are sometimes slightly cruel things you just have to do, if there is a war going on ... was that your point?

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

Citing Wikipedia...yea sure go ahead with that. lol

Ah well, which other source would you then accept?

Except for Erdogans ministry of truth, of course ...

The important word should be "was". If you try to remove it from the past, by arguing semantics or by any other means, you make it stick into the present. A past genocide would be much easier to live with than a permanently unsettled question of genocide or war event or war atrocity or paranoid fantasy of everybody else conspiring to sully a history they actually don't even care that much about as if they had nothing better to do.

The thing is, history is full of ugly things and arguing them creates a much stronger link between the uglyness and the one arguing than ancestry could ever do.

>What makes reddit and now HN think Ataturk was some sort of beacon of democracy?

I haven't seen anyone say that. People are specifically saying he would be disgusted with how non secular Turkey has become since secularizing Turkey was one of his biggest things.

Every culture that we have any sort of knowledge of is or was an amalgamation of other cultures that were absorbed.

What is the point you are trying to make, wrt genocide?

democracy and genocide are not incompatible

Read more on what lead to banishment of Armenians. If you attack unprotected Turkish villages with the help of foreign powers and betray your neighbours, you face the consequences, this is war. Also there was no such thing as hating Armenians til aforementioned betrayal. At the time there were even couple of high ranking statesman like Gabriel Noradunkyan from Armenians.

Banishment? You mean genocide, right?

Turkey lost thousands of innocent and defenseless men from Armenian attacks which makes the situation a bilateral clash. So no, I mean banishment.

> bilateral clash

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

It started out as exile. The Ottomans basically rounded up large numbers of Armenian civilians and forcefully marched them from Eastern Anatolia to today's Syria, in the hopes that separating them from their Turkish neighbors (with whom they were fighting violently) would put an end to what was seen as a civil distraction during war. Countless Armenians perished along the way as a result of gross incompetence and negligence on the part of the soldiers in charge.

If genocide is defined as "systematic and deliberate extermination of a group of people" then it wasn't genocide, because the intention was not to exterminate, but to relocate. Turkey absolutely needs to own up to what happened and pay reparations (even though it is a different country than the Ottoman Empire under which the events occurred), but in my opinion calling it genocide is inaccurate.

Word "Genocide" was introduced by Raphael Lemkin to describe systematic extermination of Armenians and Jews by Young Turks in Ottoman Empire and by Nazis in Europe.

Here is Raphael Lemkin explaining it himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moByGLA7FDc

Genocide was thoroughly planned and executed by Ottoman Government which was run by Young Turks. Archives of multiple countries have documented evidence of the fact that it was Planned Systematic Extermination of Armenians - Genocide. There are archives from US embassy in Turkey, German archives, French Archives and press archives from that period that all confirm that.

Genocide did not start with marching people to deserts in Syria. It started with arrests and massacre of around 250 political and cultural leaders of Armenian origin, to prevent any organized resistance. [1]

Entire civilized world recognizes these events as a Genocide. One of the latest recognitions came from German government (in 2015). They were allies of Ottoman Empire by that time and did not do much to prevent the Genocide. [2]

Please do not spread misinformation and mislead people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide_recognition

You are calling Genocide of 1.5 million of their own citizens "banishment". And then you advice people to go and read on the subject. Your lack of education on the topic of Armenian Genocide is astonishing.

I am calling the relocation of troublesome Armenians to Syria as banishment. Armenians perished along the way, it wasn't a systematic killing. Death toll of Armenians were only 500.000 while it was 1 million on Turkish side.

After living 600 years peacefully Armenians got greedy and betrayed Turkish people with the help of Russians.

Check my first comment there was even Armenian ministers in the government that time, did you see any Jew ministers during Hitler regime? Why would they allow such thing if they were about to commit some horrible genocide. Makes no sense.

> relocation of troublesome Armenians to Syria as banishment

didn't they "relocate" them by forcing them to march through the desert?

Most of the Armenians were located in Eastern part of Anatolia. As far as I can see there is no desert in between Syria and Eastern Anatolia.

While some Armenian independence organisations did use terrorism as a means, and indeed the question of the Armenian genocide is not that of the Ottoman Empire's momentary caprice to remove Armenians as a worse people like it was in the Holocaust (Holocaust and Medz Yeghern are incredibly different events, the former was head hunting against completely peaceful people for stupid racial ideals), the genocide happened, and words like betrayal and greed in what amounts to a global war of greed and massacres sound childish. If as Turks we have the right to indipendence as a people, so does ever other peoples.

>> Armenians got greedy and betrayed Turkish people with the help of Russians.

Bulgarians got greedy, Greeks got greedy, Assyrians got greedy, Armenians got greedy.

* Bulgarian Genocide in Batak of 1876. The number of victims 7,000.

* Greek genocide 1914–1923. 900 000 Greeks were killed.

* Assyrian genocide 1914-1925. 750 000 Assyrians were killed

* Armenian Genocide 1915 - 1923. 1 500 000 Armenians were killed.

All these predominantly Christian minorities in Turkey for some reason got greedy.

I assume lately Kurds are getting greedy as well?

>"What makes reddit and now HN think Ataturk was some sort of beacon of democracy?"

Because he abolished the Ottoman Sultanate that had ruled for nearly 500 years and established a secular democracy. He also gave women rights.

I don't think this is a fact in any way specific to HN or Reddit but rather to history itself.

Atatürk was not a beacon of democracy, he never pretended to be. As a military man, he did resort to heavy handed methods at times. The republic he left behind as his legacy is however one when you consider the circumstances. He created a secular, Muslim majority country that was aligned with the Western ideals and was even ahead of Europe in some aspects (women's suffrage). This is truly impressive considering no country in the region has been close to that level in the last century.

Please don't post unsubstantive-indignant comments to HN regardless of how right you are. Such comments are reliably destructive of the quality of conversation we're hoping for. This is clearly seen below, where the thread devolves into a flamewar about genocide, but it happens pretty much every time, so we all need to learn not to post like this.

If you have a substantive point to make, please make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't post until you do.

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