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Comment by Vorch | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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

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