Armenia, the Forgotten Genocide

The Forgotten Armenian Genocide

It began April 24th, 1915 and continued until 1917. When it was over, a million and a half Armenians were gone, dead, murdered by Turkish forces for one simple, sick reason: They were Armenians and Christians. Approximately fifty percent of a people were all but exterminated because the Ottoman Turks wanted to purify their land by ridding it of those they considered Christian “vermin.”

To this day, Turkey is an Armenian-genocide-denier, comparable to Jewish Holocaust-deniers but absent the stigma assigned to those who refuse to concede that the atrocities committed by Hitler’s Nazis actually occurred. Almost worse, and despite voluminous evidence to the contrary, America and the rest of the world seem to have accepted the official prevarications of the Turkish government that the Armenian genocide either never happened or was the consequence of a civil war.

The extensive documentation of the atrocity committed by Turks against the Armenians, the continuing Turkish denial, and the fact that the Armenian genocide of almost a century ago was a prototype for subsequent genocidal events, all were subjects of a 2005 Danish conference: http://www.diis.dk/sw11640.asp

Apparently, President Obama’s advisors failed to provide him with a briefing on those events prior to his recent visit to Turkey where he never deigned to raise the issue, never asked, never demanded, that the Turks finally admit their horrendous history. That disgraceful, politically-correct omission was motivated by Turkey’s strategic importance, its predominantly Muslim population which Obama dared not offend, and a craven lack of moral will to exert pressure on a nominal ally.

If those who are blissfully ignorant of the past are destined to repeat it, American presidents who intentionally disregard history’s atrocities are destined to encourage more of the same.

Adolph Hitler knew very well what the Turks had done twenty years earlier, and gotten away with. He adopted as his templates many of their rationales and actions to effect his Great Solution for the “Jewish problem.”

To Hitler, the Jews also were vermin and he too wanted to cleanse the Motherland, as well as the rest of the planet, of all traces of their influence and presence through his infamous policy of “Judenrein.” Based on world inaction and lack of reaction to how Turkey handled their “Armenian problem,” he seems to have believed that no one would give much of a damn.

Hitler is reputed to have said in 1939, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-479143/The-forgotten-Holocaust-The-Armenian-massacre-inspired-Hitler.html) And he was correct. . .
(Read the rest at http://genelalor.com/.)

Genocide and Hitler's Inspiration

One can never go very far wrong overestimating the barbarity of the human species. Nor can one go far wrong in stating that all examples of genocide are repugnant but, it would seem, some are more repugnant than others.

Examples of genocidal attempts to systematically wipe out a race, nation or people have long stained the annals of human history, many instances now lost in the fog of time.

Most recent genocides have occurred in Africa, in Darfur in the present century where the Sudanese government and its surrogates are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of multi-ethnic, non-Arab Muslim civilians, and in Rwanda in 1994 where rampaging Hutus are believed to have massacred over 800,000 minority Tutsis over a period of a hundred days.

Whether the Bosnian Serb efforts at “ethnic cleansing” of the mid 1990’s technically “qualified” as true genocide has been the subject of much debate in the United Nations, which had unknowingly participated in the killing of many thousands and the rape of up to 50,000 Bosniak women and children.

Apparently, the U.N. is much more able to debate than it has the capacity to act in a beneficial fashion since much of the Rwanda horror was conducted while U.N. “peacekeepers” were in that country acting more as facilitators than peacekeepers. Apparently, too, when it comes to publicizing ethnic cleansing or genocide, it’s matters more whom you know than what you know.

That fact is evident from continuing reminders of the Jewish Holocaust more than six decades after its conclusion whereas, aside from show trials after the Bosnian War, relatively little is ever heard about the slaughters there, nor about the horrendous crimes and death tolls in Darfur or Rwanda.

Granted that the Holocaust is probably the single most devastating and sickening example of genocide in the history of the planet in terms of the sheer number of Jews murdered at the hands of Adolph Hitler and Karl Adolf Eichmann. And it should always be remembered, in the probably vain hope that remembrance will insure it “Never again” occurs.

However, if memory of the Holocaust is to be forever imprinted on the collective soul of humanity, should not other catastrophic events, massacres, mass killings, also be recalled?

Wikipedia cites the destruction of Carthage as the first example of a genocide as well as Genghis Khan’s reign of terror and mass murders committed in ancient times by Jews themselves against their foes. Post 1490, some 50 locales are mentioned as the scenes of mass genocidal and “gendercidal,” (males only), slaughters.

One shameful instance of genocide that, with all the emphasis on and reminders of the Holocaust, has been widely overlooked and swept under humanity’s rug, is the “forgotten holocaust,” the World War One murder of 1.5 million Aremenians by Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1917: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-479143/The-forgotten-Holocaust-The-Armenian-massacre-inspired-Hitler.html. It’s misrepresented as “Europe’s First Holocaust” but it did provide inspiration for Adolph Hitler's Holocaust.

More in Part II to follow.
(http://genelalor.com/)