Posts
By Jim “Gymbeaux” Brown, November 17, 2020
With a lot of help from my Internet Friends!
DISCLAIMER: I am ashamed to admit that I was totally unaware of the Turkish/Armenian Genocide of over One Million Armenians. I can’t be the only one that is why I have written and posted this Nugget for the Noggin involving a horrible chapter of world history.
I heard only a few sentences of a Glenn Beck’s broadcast on 11/17/2020 where he made reference to Adoloph Hitler engaging in a genocide of the Jewish people, not only in countries that Germany conquered but also German Jews as well. Part of Hitler’s justification involved Turkey who did something very similar to the Armenians living in Turkey and the world looked the other way. Was that true? I must admit that I had not heard of the Turkey/Armenian genocide. It is a subject certainly not taught in any school classrooms that I attended. That should come as no surprise when you consider what IS and what is NOT being taught in our history classes in most of our schools. Therefore, I did my homework. There were two very interesting Internet sites that made reference to (1) the Turkey/Armenian genocide and then (2) Hitler’s use of the genocide and the lack of any world outrage to do the same thing to the Jewish people he encountered wherever he went including his own country, Germany.
This is the longest Nugget I have ever uploaded to my Blog
and I feel the subject is too important not to post it. I am fully aware that most people will never
take the time to read it all but they should!
Why? Because HISTORY DOES
REPEAT ITSELF AND HERE IS LIVING PROOF THAT IT DOES AND HOW IT COST MILLIONS
UPON MILLIONS OF PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD THEIR LIVES! There is a second and more harrowing reason I
have copied and pasted these two articles, I see it happening again and like
before, no one is paying attention and no one seems to care. Christians are the 2020 target. They are being murdered all over the world
and the world turns a blind eye.
Christianity is being attacked in America, something I never thought I
would ever see and Americans and the world have turned its collective blind eyes
to the situation.
AMAZINGLY there are people today, some very important
people including college professors, who do not believe that the WWII Holocaust
actually occurred in spite of news reels, photographs and eyewitness
testimony. To them, it never
happened. Just like to many, including
the country of Turkey, the Turkey/Armenian genocide never happened. Just like the murdering of 2020 Christians
around the world has never happened.
Without any specific authority to do so, the Governors across America are taking steps to supposedly fight the COVID-19 virus that they, without any medical training, are doing by locking down economies and forbidding people to even attend church services and properly bury their dead. At the very same time these Governors have no problems with groups like ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter gathering in great numbers to not only protest but also destroy cities and businesses. Then as if by some miracle when Joe Biden appears to have won the Presidency, these Governors find no harm in mass gatherings of people to celebrate his apparent win. Who knew the COVID-19 virus was so thoughtful that it will not infect ANTIFA, BLM or Biden’s supporters? What a wonderful virus to be so considerate.
I looked up the definition of IGNORE and found that it
means, NEGLECT, DISREGARD, OVERLOOK, SLIGHT, FORGET mean to pass over without
giving due attention. The world IGNORED what Turkey did to the
Armenians. The world IGNORED what
Germany did the population of every country it conquered but especially their
own Jewish German citizens. The world is
IGNORING the systematic destruction of people of faith. And now America is IGNORING the blatant
disregard of civil liberties by our own elected Governors and Mayors.
SPECIAL NOTE: If you checkout the following annotated Internet links, you can locate the footnotes that verify all the information contained within the articles. The following hopefully will provide the reader with a very valuable lesson from world history that should be both taught and never forgotten!
From The History Channel: https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/armenian-genocide The Armenian genocide was the systematic killing and deportation of Armenians by the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. In 1915, during World War I, leaders of the Turkish government set in motion a plan to expel and massacre Armenians. By the early 1920s, when the massacres and deportations finally ended, between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians were dead, with many more forcibly removed from the country. Today, most historians call this event a genocide: a premeditated and systematic campaign to exterminate an entire people. However, the Turkish government still does not acknowledge the scope of these events.
The Roots of Genocide: The Ottoman Empire
The Armenian people have made their home in the Caucasus
region of Eurasia for some 3,000 years. For some of that time, the kingdom of
Armenia was an independent entity: At the beginning of the 4th century A.D.,
for instance, it became the first nation in the world to make Christianity its
official religion.
But for the most part, control of the region shifted from
one empire to another. During the 15th century, Armenia was absorbed into the
mighty Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman rulers, like most of their subjects, were
Muslim. They permitted religious minorities like the Armenians to maintain some
autonomy, but they also subjected Armenians, who they viewed as “infidels,” to
unequal and unjust treatment.
Christians had to pay higher taxes than Muslims, for
example, and they had very few political and legal rights.
In spite of these obstacles, the Armenian community
thrived under Ottoman rule. They tended to be better educated and wealthier
than their Turkish neighbors, who in turn grew to resent their success.
This resentment was compounded by suspicions that the
Christian Armenians would be more loyal to Christian governments (that of the
Russians, for example, who shared an unstable border with Turkey) than they were
to the Ottoman caliphate.
These suspicions grew more acute as the Ottoman Empire
crumbled. At the end of the 19th century, the despotic Turkish Sultan Abdul
Hamid II – obsessed with loyalty above all, and infuriated by the nascent
Armenian campaign to win basic civil rights – declared that he would solve the
“Armenian question” once and for all.
“I will soon settle those Armenians,” he told a reporter
in 1890. “I will give them a box on the ear which will make them…relinquish
their revolutionary ambitions.”
The First Armenian Massacre
Between 1894 and 1896, this “box on the ear” took the form
of a state-sanctioned program.
In response to large scale protests by Armenians, Turkish
military officials, soldiers and ordinary men sacked Armenian villages and
cities and massacred their citizens. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians
were murdered.
Young Turks
In 1908, a new government came to power in Turkey. A group
of reformers who called themselves the “Young Turks” overthrew Sultan Abdul
Hamid and established a more modern constitutional government.
At first, the Armenians were hopeful that they would have
an equal place in this new state, but they soon learned that what the
nationalistic Young Turks wanted most of all was to “Turkify” the empire. According
to this way of thinking, non-Turks – and especially Christian non-Turks – were
a grave threat to the new state.
World War I Begins
In 1914, the Turks entered World War I on
the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (At the same time, Ottoman
religious authorities declared a holy war against all Christians except
their allies.)
Military leaders began to argue that the Armenians were
traitors: If they thought they could win independence if the Allies were
victorious, this argument went, the Armenians would be eager to fight for the
enemy.
As the war intensified, Armenians organized volunteer
battalions to help the Russian army fight against the Turks in the Caucasus
region. These events, and general Turkish suspicion of the Armenian people, led
the Turkish government to push for the “removal” of the Armenians from the war
zones along the Eastern Front.
Armenian Genocide Begins
On April 24, 1915, the Armenian genocide began. That day,
the Turkish government arrested and executed several hundred Armenian
intellectuals.
After that, ordinary Armenians were turned out of their
homes and sent on death marches through the Mesopotamian desert without food or
water.
Frequently, the marchers were stripped naked and forced to walk under the scorching sun until they dropped dead. People who stopped to rest were shot.
At the same time, the Young Turks created a “Special
Organization,” which in turn organized “killing squads” or “butcher battalions”
to carry out, as one officer put it, “the liquidation of the Christian
elements.”
These killing squads were often made up of murderers and other ex-convicts. They drowned people in rivers, threw them off cliffs, crucified them and burned them alive. In short order, the Turkish countryside was littered with Armenian corpses.
Records show that during this “Turkification” campaign,
government squads also kidnapped children, converted them to Islam and
gave them to Turkish families. In some places, they raped women and forced them
to join Turkish “harems” or serve as slaves. Muslim families moved into the
homes of deported Armenians and seized their property.
Though reports vary, most sources agree that there were
about 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the time of the massacre. In
1922, when the genocide was over, there were just 388,000 Armenians
remaining in the Ottoman Empire.
Did you know? American news outlets
have also been reluctant to use the word “genocide” to describe Turkey’s
crimes. The phrase “Armenian genocide” did not appear in the New York Times
until 2004.
Armenian Genocide Today
After the Ottomans surrendered in 1918, the leaders of the
Young Turks fled to Germany, which promised not to prosecute them for
the genocide. (However, a group of Armenian nationalists devised a plan,
known as Operation Nemesis, to track down and assassinate the leaders of the
genocide.)
Ever since then, the Turkish government has denied that a
genocide took place. The Armenians were an enemy force, they
argue, and their slaughter was a necessary war measure.
Today, Turkey is an important ally of the United States and other Western nations, and so their governments have been slow to condemn the long-ago killings. In March 2010, a U.S. Congressional panel voted to recognize the genocide. And on October 29, 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution that recognized the Armenian genocide.
DID HITLER USE THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AS A INCENTIVE
TO TERMNATE THE JEWS?
Judge for yourself:
Here is the Internet link
regarding Hitler’s reactions: https://www.meforum.org/3434/armenian-genocide-hitler It is well known by genocide scholars that
in 1939 Adolf Hitler urged his generals to exterminate members of the
Polish race. "Who speaks today of the extermination of the
Armenians?" Hitler asked, just a week before the September 1, 1939
invasion of Poland. However, while
it is generally agreed that Hitler was well aware of the Armenian genocide, some
genocide scholars and historians of the Ottoman Empire have questioned whether
he actually made the above statement or even intended to exterminate portions
of the "Polish race."
Still, there is evidence that the massacre of the Ottoman
Armenians helped persuade the Nazis that national minorities posed a threat to
empires dominated by an ethnic group such as the Germans or the Turks.
Furthermore, these minorities could be exterminated to the benefit of the
perpetrator with little risk. Indeed, it was German officials who had
smuggled out of the Ottoman Empire the leaders of the Young Turk regime,
culpable for the deaths of over a million Armenians and a million or more other
Christian minorities such as the Assyrians and Greeks. Diverse historical evidence suggests
that Hitler viewed the Armenians and Poles as analogous; in several ways, his
statement about the Armenians was consistent with his other beliefs and
writings.
A number of clues point to the possibility that Hitler's
"final solution" was inspired by the Turkish massacre of its Armenian
population in 1915. His infamous 1939 question, "Who speaks today of the
extermination of the Armenians?" although hotly debated concerning its
authenticity, is only one indication leading to that conclusion.
The
Assassin's Leak
The historical context of Hitler's statement and the manner in
which it came to Western attention has long been problematic. On November 24,
1945, The Times of London published an article stating that Hitler
referred to the extermination of the Armenians during an address to his
commanders-in-chief on August 22, 1939, a statement that was read at a hearing
of the Nuremberg trial. Hitler's speech asserted that the aim of the war is not
to attain certain lines, but consists in the physical destruction of the
opponent. Thus, for the time being, I have sent to the East only my
"Death's Head units" with the order to kill without pity or mercy all
men, women, and children of Polish race or language. Only in such a way, will
we win the vital living space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the
extermination of the Armenians?
The anti-Nazi writer Louis Lochner, a former bureau chief
of the Associated Press in Berlin, quoted Hitler's statement from an original
Nazi document before the Nuremberg trials had even convened. Lochner had
a variety of sources within the Nazi government and had been interned from
December 1941 to May 1942 before being exchanged for German diplomats interned
in the United States. After his release, he published What about
Germany? containing the quote mentioning the Armenians. The
quote was used in the November 1945 The Times article, which
cited the ongoing proceedings of the Nuremberg trials.
Two additional copies of the memorandum describing Hitler's speech
were found immediately after the war in the files of the Oberkommando der
Wehrmacht (German High Command, OKW), but neither contained the Armenian quote.
Nor was either military document signed as would be expected for an official
record of a meeting. These incongruities led Nuremberg prosecutors to conclude
that there had been two Hitler speeches on August 22 and that the Lochner
version containing the quote was a merger of notes from both. As a result of
the disparities, objections were made by lawyers for two Nuremberg defendants, Hermann
Göring and Erich Raeder, to the authenticity of the OKW versions and
to the inclusion of the Lochner document in evidence. The key issue for the
defense was not the Armenian quote per se but rather the term "brutal
measures," which they claimed was never used by Hitler although they
conceded that he had used "severe" expressions.
Since the prosecution had other records of the meetings, as well
as one introduced by defendant Raeder, the Lochner document was included in the
trial record but was not introduced as evidence. In the context of the
Nuremberg trials, the overriding issue was not the Armenian quote but Hitler's
call for a brutal war of aggression against Poland. But defenders of the Ottoman
Empire regard the court's decision as key: The military versions of Hitler's
speech without the quote are viewed as more reliable, and the Lochner version
as suspect or tainted.
The question of Lochner's source for the document, and hence the
quote, has therefore been the crux of intense historical interest. Lochner
himself indicated only that he had obtained it from "Mr. Maass"
without saying who the original source was at the August 22, 1939 meeting. But
subsequent research had shown that the Lochner and The Times versions
have a clear chain of transmission. The original source of Hitler's speech
on the Poles and the Armenians and of its transmission to The Times was
Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, a German military intelligence
organization, and a leading figure in the military opposition to Hitler.
Canaris became involved with several conspiracies against the dictator,
including a July 20, 1944 assassination plot. Another member of the German
resistance, Hans Bernd Gisevius, confirmed that Canaris took notes of
the speech even though it was "forbidden to do so."
Canaris's notes were passed to three men, all of whom were
executed before the Nuremberg trials convened and thus could not be questioned:
Hans Oster, Ludwig Beck, and Hermann Maass. Historian Kevork
Bardakjian concluded that Canaris likely passed the notes to his deputy,
Oster, who then transmitted them to Beck, a conservative general and former
chief of the General Staff, who had long opposed Nazi influence on the German
military and foreign policy. Beck probably instructed Maass, formerly general
manager of the Reich Committee of German Youth Associations, to give the
document to Lochner due to Beck's role as a "leader of the German
resistance." Like Canaris, Beck was involved in a number of conspiracies
and was executed after the failure of the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate
Hitler, in which he had a leading role. Finally, historian Winfried
Baumgart has argued that Canaris's notes also appear to have been the
source of the two unsigned documents in the German high command files.
Gisevius and Oster believed that the invasion of Poland gave them
a unique chance to get rid of Hitler and ensure peace with
Poland. Canaris's opposition to Hitler was wide-ranging. An official with
British intelligence boasted of having "buil[t] … up" Canaris as a
potential assassin of Hitler. In 1944, the Gestapo found documents
revealing Canaris to be conspiring with Catholics and the West against Hitler.
The admiral was executed in a concentration camp on April 9, 1945, for plotting
a coup against Hitler, along with Oster.
Turkish
Historians on the "Armenian Quote"
Hitler's citation of the Armenians in his August 22, 1939 meeting
has been an important concern for Turkish historians and pro-Ottoman analysts. Türkkaya
Ataöv of Ankara University, with the apparent endorsement of the Turkish
government, has contended that the Armenian quote does not appear in Nuremberg
documents and is a forgery. He goes further to assert that no Armenian genocide
took place, that Armenians had collaborated with the Nazis, and that Turks had
welcomed Jews.
Similarly, Princeton University professor Heath Lowry suggested
in 1985 that the lack of clear evidence that Hitler's alleged statement about
the Armenians was "authentic" should have put an end to attempts to
recognize the Armenian genocide in exhibits of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,
resolutions of the U.S. Congress, or in the curricula on the Holocaust
established by state boards of education. The logical outcome, Lowry argued,
was that the Armenian genocide was simply a type of "propaganda" and
"vilification against the Republic of Turkey." Finally, Guenter
Lewy, professor emeritus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has
contended that any attempt to link the anti-Armenian massacres and the
Holocaust rests "on a shaky factual foundation." But Lewy has
conceded that the document containing Hitler's statement about the Armenians
might "represent an embellishment of points made in the speech" by
Hitler to his generals in August 1939.
In contrast, in a notable 1995 article in Holocaust and
Genocide Studies, Roger W. Smith, Eric Markusen, and Robert
Lifton argued that Lowry was being professionally irresponsible in claiming
that the Armenian genocide was simply a "ludicrous" Armenian claim.
In their view, it was the more recent claim that Hitler did not refer to the
Armenian genocide that lacked an evidentiary basis. Moreover, they
demonstrate that Lowry, like historian Justin McCarthy, had engaged in a
pattern of protesting academic characterizations of the Armenian genocide that
was welcomed by the Turkish government. According to Inside Higher
Education, McCarthy once called the Armenian genocide a
"meaningless" idea and served on the board of a grant-making
organization in Washington, D.C., the Institute for Turkish Studies, which has
ties to the Turkish government. McCarthy argues that the Armenian case is
dissimilar to the Holocaust and resembles the U.S. Civil War.
One of Lewy's preferred sources for Hitler's speech were the
copies from the OKW, used by Nuremberg prosecutors to demonstrate command
responsibility for numerous crimes in Poland. Lewy has argued that Hitler's
statement about the Armenians was not "accepted as evidence by the
Nuremberg Tribunal," citing Lowry to this effect. Ankara University's
Ataöv similarly asserted: "Hundreds of thousands of captured Nazi
documents were assembled as evidence in the trial of the major Nazi war
criminals. One cannot find the oft-repeated Hitler 'statement' among these
documents." The idea that the Hitler quote is a forgery and that it
does not appear in the Nuremberg trial documents is frequently repeated on
websites dedicated to denial of the Armenian genocide.
While the Lochner document was not used at Nuremberg, even Lowry
admits that volume VII of the compilation of evidence against the Nazis,
entitled Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, reproduced the
statement. That compilation contained in its introduction a description of
the document series as the tribunal's "documentary evidence demonstrating
the criminality of the former leaders of the German Reich." This means
that the document was introduced as evidence before the International Military
Tribunal at Nuremberg even if it was not used on a specific day of the trials.
The Lochner document with the Armenia quote was also included in the 1961
publication of foreign policy documents by the German Foreign Office.
The
Armenian Genocide as Nazi Precedent
As part of a larger effort to deny or downplay the Armenian
genocide, some historians have claimed that Hitler did not cite the Armenians
as an example of the impunity of perpetrators. They have also denied that the
Armenian genocide provided the inspiration or any form of precedent for the
design and conduct of Nazi aggression and genocide.
One method has been to suggest that the Nazi program of
extermination was a late creation. Thus, for example, Lewy suggested that
Hitler did not order exterminations in Poland—or mention the extermination of
the Armenians—because "by August 1939, Hitler had not yet decided upon the
destruction of the Jews."
This argument is unpersuasive for several reasons. First, as has
been shown, there are compelling reasons to believe that Hitler's statements
about extermination in 1939 indeed cited the Armenians and were aimed at the
Poles. Hitler's intentions toward the Jews had been spelled out across many
statements, including in the notorious January 1939 speech in which Hitler
"prophesied" that another world war would result in the
"annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." Second, Hitler had
repeatedly engaged in virulent anti-Polish and anti-Slavic rhetoric prior to
August 1939. Third, Hitler's decision to destroy Poland as a nation, while
allowing some Poles to survive, was entirely consistent with his political
philosophy that nations played out a chaotic struggle for life in an unforgiving
world, as shown by history. Finally, there was the tacit acquiescence of the
major powers in the Turkish model of ethnic cleansing and genocide. These may
have provided Hitler with reasons to adopt it for Poland and the East.
To what extent was the Armenian genocide understood as a model by
Hitler? In a 1931 interview, he told a German newspaper editor that when
deciding Germany's future, one should "[t]hink of the biblical
deportations and the massacres of the Middle Ages (Rosenberg refers to them)
and remember the extermination of the Armenians." Hitler and other
contemporary European leaders admired Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as a
national leader who won for the Turkish people the living space it needed from
the Slavs and the British. Speaking in 1925, Hitler "dwelt at length on
patriotism and national pride and quoted approvingly the role of Kemal
Atatürk of Turkey and the example of Mussolini, who had marched on
Rome" a few weeks prior.
The parallels between Hitler and Atatürk were also noted at the
time. The influential Foreign Affairs journal published an
article in the 1930s stating, "Just as in Italy since 1922, and as in
Germany since early in the present year, the conduct of political affairs in
Turkey rests today on the personality of a leader. … By means of a clever
scheme … the President, while constitutionally without undue influence, becomes
the real autocrat.'" It argued that with the end of foreign
"influence," Turkey "had become an almost homogeneous
state" in "national and religious" terms, so that its
"Christian minorities hardly existed any longer." In early 1939,
the German socialists had also pointed out the similarity between the Nazis and
past leaders of Turkey. Three days after the speech reported by Canaris,
Hitler wrote to Mussolini that he hoped that the Turks could be persuaded to
join Italy, Japan, and Russia in an anti-British coalition. He planned to
hand over parts of the southern Soviet Union to Turkey in due time.
The fate of the Armenians was also understood within Nazi
ideology. A key influence on Hitler was the Prussian-educated British writer Houston
Stewart Chamberlain. His work Foundations of the Nineteenth Century sold
250,000 copies by 1938 and secured his fame in Germany. Volume 1 of this
work offered a model for Germany, arguing that Turkey was "the last little
corner of Europe in which a whole people lives in undisturbed prosperity and
happiness," and blaming non-German world powers (Britain and France) for
encouraging an Armenian rebellion, in response to which "the otherwise
humane Moslem rises and destroys the disturber of the peace."
In 1927, leading Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg had
published a booklet calling Chamberlain the "apostle and founder of a
German future." In 1938, Rosenberg published a collection of speeches
in which he commented that in 1921, after the Turkish minister Talat Pasha
was murdered in Berlin by an Armenian, a campaign was waged in the
"international press" to release the killer due to the history of
struggle between Armenians and Turks. Rosenberg endorsed the Turks'
resistance to Armenian claims for autonomy ("den armenischen Staat im
Staat"), comparing the Armenians to the Jews, because he claimed the
Armenians engaged in espionage against Turkey as the Jews did against
Germany. He "praised Talat Pasha … [and] minimized the [Ottoman
Christian] genocide."
Rosenberg also introduced Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter
to Hitler. Scheubner-Richter had been the German vice-consul in Erzerum and
documented the planning and implementation of the murder of Armenians by the
Young Turks in the name of Islam and pan-Turkic ideology. Scheubner-Richter's
relationship to Hitler was so close that he was killed standing next to Hitler
and Rosenberg during the failed Munich "Beer Hall" putsch of 1923.
Hitler then dedicated the first part of Mein Kampf to his
"irreplaceable" fallen comrade. Armenian-American historian
Vahkan Dadrian has argued that Scheubner-Richter had a "direct"
influence on Hitler that may have included introducing him to the example of
how the Ottoman Armenians (then called the "Jews of the Orient") were
deported from their villages, worked to death, starved, and frozen to death
during exposure to harsh winter conditions. Mike Joseph has called
Scheubner-Richter the "personal link from [the Armenian] genocide to
Hitler." Scheubner-Richter's
reports regarding the genocidal solution to the Armenian question foreshadow
and may have inspired Hitler's later ideas and rhetoric regarding the Jews as
did his descriptions of Turkish methods, including provocations and allegations
of terrorism and revolution. Prior to his death, Scheubner-Richter urged that
Germany be "cleansed" of alien peoples by "ruthless"
measures.
Other high-ranking Nazis were also well-placed to learn how the
Armenian genocide occurred and to inform Hitler. Franz von Papen became
Hitler's vice chancellor after serving as chief of staff of the Fourth Turkish
Army during World War I and was responsible for managing German-Austrian and
German-Turkish relations under the Nazis. Rudolf Hess, deputy inspector
of concentration camps under Himmler, had served in the Ottoman-German forces
fighting the Russians during World War I. Hans von Seeckt was chief of
the Ottoman General Staff in 1917 and 1918 and "laid the groundwork for
the later emergence of the Third Reich's Wehrmacht" and "embraced
Hitler and his ideology."
The similarity of the genocidal methods employed by the Nazis and
the Ottomans is also inescapable. Parallels between Ottoman and Nazi theory and
practice include the central place of race in the self-conception of the
fascist elites and the notion of relocating ethnic minorities to reservations.
Hitler often expressed his belief that race was the dominant independent
variable in history and that it had to be dealt with directly by any
ethnonationalist leader who wanted to be successful. "When the race is in danger
of being oppressed," he wrote, "the question of legality plays only a
secondary role."
Both the Ottomans and the Nazis also used the concept of ethnic
"cleaning" or "cleansing." While the Young Turks
implemented a "clean sweep of internal enemies—the indigenous
Christians," according to the then-German ambassador in Constantinople, the Nazis implemented a
"housecleaning of Jews, intelligentsia, clergy, and the nobility." The official who announced the
ethnic cleansing plan for Poland may have been aware of similar policies of the
internal security officials of the Ottoman Empire, which resulted in
"hundreds of thousands of the Ottoman Empire's Muslims, Christian
Armenians, and Orthodox Greeks [being] expelled or murdered." Hitler himself used
"cleaning" or "cleansing" as a euphemism for extermination and described his rule as being
characterized by an "unheard of cleansing process." On December 12, 1941, Joseph
Goebbels wrote in his diary that "with respect of the Jewish question,
the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep." Finally, the impunity
with which the Armenians had been slaughtered—the essence of Hitler's August
22, 1939 remark—was reinforced by the international community's failure to
prevent the massacre of other peoples, including later massacres by the
Italians using poison-gas and machine-guns in Ethiopia.
Conclusion
(Not my conclusion, but the conclusion of the author Hannibal Travis)
Numerous ideological and political influences led from the
Armenian genocide to the rape of Poland and the Holocaust. Chamberlain, Hess,
Rosenberg, Seeckt, Scheubner-Richter, and von Papen all likely played a role in
prompting Hitler to use Turkey's example as a model for Poland. Hitler compared
the two cases in his 1939 speech, which, like most evidence that the Holocaust
took place, was not relied upon in the tribunal's judgment. Subsequent efforts to discredit
the speech by defenders of the Ottoman Empire should not, however, blind us to
the manifold connections between the Armenian genocide and that perpetrated by
the Nazis.
Hannibal Travis is the author
of Genocide in the Middle East: The Ottoman Empire, Iraq and Sudan (Carolina
Academic Press, 2010) and "The Assyrian Genocide: A Tale of Oblivion and
Denial," in Rene Lemarchand, ed., Forgotten Genocides: Denial,
Oblivion, and Memory (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
My final note in regard to all of the
above: What will people write in the history books
about 2020? We are all IGNORING the
obvious! How many millions of people
are going to die reportedly from the COVID-19 Virus? My question and the question that everyone
ought to be asking, especially the national news media folks, is who created
the virus? China did! Was it
intentional? It was certainly NOT created by accident!!! I believe it WAS intentionally created
as a weapon to be used by the Chinese military whenever needed for whatever
reason they thought it would be effective.
Was it intentionally released upon the world? This is just my opinion but I believe that it
was. China has made it very clear that
it wants to control the world. They have
no desire to attack America, its #1 enemy with military force and instead released
the virus that attacked our economy, our faith in all that is right and just,
and has now created an environment where we are now attacking each other. No military attack could have been as short
lived and more effective than what China has done and yet THE WORLD HAS
IGNORED WHAT IT HAS DONE! Like the
example set by Turkey and then Germany, Communist China will never be punished
for what it has done, ever, unless something changes. Where is the news media? Why are they not demanding answers to these
questions? Everyone is IGNORNING it for
the same reason that no one ever challenged Turkey or Germany – they don’t want
to “upset the apple cart!” We are in a
State of War, like it or not! The
problem is that no one knows for certain who the enemy is, an unseen virus,
China, or both. I personally believe it
is both!
What exactly would YOU have done in the early 1900s and then in
the 1930s if you had known about Turkey and/or Germany? Would you have spoken up? Would you have taken action? What are you going to do about China and the
Virus in 2020? Are you going to speak up
or are you going to do what MILLIONS already have done, blame President Trump
for the virus? Are you going to take
action? Or are you going to do what
people have done for decades upon decades – just ignore it and hope that it
will eventually go away and no one will ever talk about it again; at least
until the next time when they will do what they have always done, compare it to
disasters of the past that they chose to ignore!
In my mind, there is no difference between Turkey and the
Armenians; Germany and the Jews and now China and the World! NONE!
What say you?
