What is the most horrible crime against humanity in history? To Henry Morgenthau Sr., who served as the US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire between 1913 and 1916, it was the Armenian genocide. Morgenthau wrote in 1919:
“I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915.”
Up to 1.5 million Armenians were wiped out in their native lands in Ottoman Turkey in a genocidal campaign organized by the Party of Union and Progress, otherwise known as the Young Turks.
102 years after this crime against humanity, the world will finally be able to see an epic Armenian genocide- era movie, The Promise, directed by Terry George and starring Christian Bale. The movie is scheduled to be released in the United States on April 21.
The movie was screened in September at the Toronto International Film Festival to rather small audiences. A special Capitol Hill viewing in Washington was also organized on March 23. Despite the small number of people who have seen the movie, as of April 9 it received 96,897 votes on IMDB and was rated 4.2.
The historian Stefan Ihrig explained why the rating is so low in Forbes magazine:
“Here this movie, for all intents and purposes not yet available to the public, has become something of an online sensation, or rather an online battlefield… We are witnessing yet another anti-Armenian denialist campaign playing out abroad, far away from Turkey, in open, democratic societies. While it is not clear who is orchestrating the campaign, it has to be assumed that, as with other campaigns, connections go back to the Turkish government and/or nationalist groups.”
Obviously, there is a reason for this anti-Armenian and anti-truth campaign.
Turkey seems determined to erase any sign of the Armenian presence in native Armenian lands.
The newspaper Agos reported on March 22 that gravestones believed to be from the Armenian cemetery in the Beybasi neighborhood of Erzincan have been removed from the graveyard. The gravestones, which have Armenian cross-stones (khachkars) and letters on them, together with human bones have been scattered around the area. Some locals told Agos there is also an Armenian church in the city but it has been largely destroyed. Only its foundation remains.
Even today, Turkey does not allow dead Armenians to rest in peace.
Armenian gravestones and crossstones have been found scattered in many places across Turkey, such as in sewers. During excavation work in the city of Tekirdag in 2015, Armenian gravestones were found in a sewer, reported the Turkish Dogan News Agency (DHA).
Armenian churches and schools are also systematically targeted.
Researcher Raffi Bedrosyan writes that Armenian church and school buildings
“disappeared or were converted to other uses. If not burnt and destroyed outright in 1915 or left to deteriorate by neglect, they became converted buildings for banks, radio stations, mosques, state schools, or state monopoly warehouses for tobacco, tea, sugar, etc., or simply private houses and stables for the Turks and Kurds.”
In recent months, an Armenian Protestant church in the city of Elazig has been turned into a parking lot; the historic Surp Asdvadzadzin (Mother Mary) Armenian church in the city of Kayseri is being turned into a library and “book café.” And the historic Armenian Surp (Saint) Minas church in Erzurum is now a stable.
Turkey does not only deny the genocide, but also blames the victims for it. Prof. Taner Akcam wrote in 2015 that Turkish history textbooks used in elementary and middle schools
“characterize Armenians as people ‘who are incited by foreigners, who aim to break apart the state and the country, and who murdered Turks and Muslims.’ Meanwhile, the Armenian Genocide – referred to as the ‘Armenian matter’ in textbooks – is described as a lie perpetrated in order to meet these goals, and is defined as the biggest threat to Turkish national security.”
Historical facts are systematically hidden from Turkish school children.
Instead, they should have been provided with truthful sources such as the 2016 book The Magnitude of Genocide. In it, scholars Colin Tatz and Winton Higgins write that the Young Turks “adopted an authoritarian ethnic nationstate based on Türklük [‘Turkishness’], which included linguistic uniformity and Islamic adherence… Thereupon the non-Turkish-speaking Christian minorities in Anatolia became a ‘problem’ to be solved as part of the ethnic nation-building enterprise.” The Armenian genocide “was certainly racially based in the ethnic, religious, and linguistic senses.
“Turkish paramilitaries dealt with the three Christian minorities (Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians) through pogroms, deportations and other atrocities laced with spectacular and gratuitous sadism. The Turks deployed concentration camps and special killing units; they engaged in massacres, public butchering, drownings and poisonings; they employed elementary gas chambers, medical experiments, starvation and death marches. (A quarter of a century later the German Nazi regime would assiduously replicate all of these genocidal methods.) French-Armenian historian Raymond Kevorkian estimates the death toll included 1.5 million Armenians, between 750,000 and 900,000 Greeks, and between 275,000 and 400,000 Christian Assyrians.”
Sadly, many scholars have failed to investigate this crime against humanity and many governments still have not officially recognized it. “But one person who didn’t forget the Armenian genocide (or the amnesia surrounding it) was Adolf Hitler,” write Tatz and Higgins. “He was reported as citing it, as a worthy precedent for how to treat enemy civilians, to his high command on August 22, 1939, just days before he ordered the attack on Poland that triggered World War II: …‘Who after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’” To stay alive, many survivors of the genocide had to convert to the religion of the majority in the villages or cities where they lived or to which they were taken. If the majority was Sunni, they converted to Islam. If the majority was Alevis, they became Alevis. Most of them still hide their Armenian roots due to fear of violence.
The exact number of “hidden” or “Islamized” Armenians is not known but estimates vary. Savas Ozbey, a columnist with the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, reported in 2013 that according to Haykazun Alvrtsyan, the director of the Study Center for Western Armenian Issues, there are around 1.5-2 million Islamized Armenians in Turkey today. Hidden Armenians constitute almost half of that number.
According to Yusuf Halacoglu, the former president of the Turkish Institute of History and an MP of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), “By looking at UN records, we can say that there are about 500,000 crypto-Armenians in Turkey today.”
Ozbey conducted interviews with some Islamized, hidden and not-sohidden Armenians. One of them, an Armenian called Zeki, said, “They have made life unbearable for us. The government too knows we are Armenian. That is why, when forced, they tell us ‘to pull down our pants’ to check whether we have been circumcised. It was not only in 1915. We were also victimized in the September 12, 1980 coup d’état, and during the incidents of terrorism. They tortured even my seven-year-old nephew. The severity of the tortures could only be understood from the blood on the ceilings, not just on the walls.”
Ali Gundogdu said that his grandfather, who was a survivor of the genocide, kept saying the same things until his last breath in a hospital room in 1964: “Never ever say that you are Armenian. What Armenian? Do you want to be slaughtered, too?” The Armenian genocide is not “an issue of the past.” With all the Armenian churches used for sacrilegious purposes, cemeteries still destroyed, gravestones found in sewers, and bones scattered across the ground as well as tens of thousands of Islamized Armenians not being able to come out due to fears of backlash, the Armenian genocide is still ongoing in Turkey. That is why everyone must see the magnificent movie The Promise, to tell the denialists and liars that the victims of the genocide shall never be forgotten.
Originally published on 2017-04-17
About the author: Uzay Bulut is a Turkish journalist based in Washington, DC.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!
Donate to Support Us
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
A blast caused by a suicide car bombing hit the center of Ankara on Sunday evening (March 13th, 2016) resulting in over a hundred casualties. The Turkish authorities were very quick to announce the identity of the suicide person: A Kurdish woman in close relation with the Kurdistan Workers Party. Nevertheless, this terror act in Ankara once again opened the “Kurdish Question” which is in direct connection with the question of Kurdistan’s independence and terrorism as the political instrument in the realization of the national projects and ultimate goals.PrologueThere are many the so-called “stateless nations” or better to say “stateless ...
Last week Pontian Greeks throughout the world justifiably recognized a tragic day in their history that has come to be known as the Pontian Genocide.I wrote about the anniversary, obscure to most people around me who are not well-versed in Greek history and even had to repeatedly change my auto-correct on my computer, which insisted on changing the word Pontian to Pontiac.This anniversary was followed by another recognition of yet another genocide of Greeks— officially commemorated on April 6 and recalling the tragic events targeting the Greeks of Eastern Thrace— the region known today as European Turkey or the lands ...
Genocide accusations are, it would seem, the latest fashion spreading out of the Balkans. On December 5, a former minister in the “government” of NATO occupied and administered Kosovo, Ivan Todosijević, who happens to be an otherwise occupation friendly and cooperative ethnic Serb, was sentenced to a two-year prison term. The court found him guilty of making what it considered the outrageous claim that the so-called genocidal “Račak massacre,” which in 1999 triggered NATO aggression against Yugoslavia, was an imposture. Since the trial began just two days before, by Balkan standards the swiftly reached verdict was remarkably expeditious, suggesting the ...
Sultan Abdul Hamid II, in the face of a rising secular nationalism in the late 1800s, that culminated in the Young Turk movement, tried to restore the influence of the Ottoman Empire among Islamic nations and the Empire’s many peoples by stressing the importance of Islam and the Ottoman Caliphate, of the role of the Ottomans as the protectors of Islam and, in the modern world, a bulwark against western colonialism.Over a hundred years after he left power, after the Empire was broken up by the western powers after the First World War, after the Turkish nationalists under Mustafa Kemal, ...
PrefaceDue to the current conflict in (East) Ukraine (historically known as Russia Minor), the world is more and more becoming informed about the genocide of the Poles, Jews, and Russians on the territory of West Ukraine during WWII committed by Ukrainian Nazi-nationalists (the Banderists). However, at the same time, in the Balkans, parallelly with the Ukrainian case, the organized (sadistic) genocide of the Jews, Roma, and above all the ethnic Serbs were on agenda but the world audience is still not properly informed about the case – the case occurred in the Nazi-shaped Independent State of Croatia.At the very start, ...
Protesters have called for all statues of the former imperial ruler to be removed in recognition of his massacres in the Congo. As 10,000 people took to the streets of Brussels on Sunday (7 June) to protest as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, there was one landmark which drew their ire more than any other: the equestrian statue of King Leopold II outside Belgium’s royal palace.“Murderer!” the protesters cried as they climbed the statue and waved the flag of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Had the statue been flimsy enough to pull down they would have done it, just as fellow BLM protesters toppled ...
The controversial film director has been reported to authorities by the Antifascist League.A criminal complaint against film director Jakov Sedlar has been filed due to historical counterfeits that he used during the production of his documentary “Jasenovac – The Truth”. The complaint has been filed by the Antifascist League of Croatia due to criminal offense of incitement to violence and hatred, reports tportal.hr on July 15, 2016.In the explanation of the compliant, the Antifascist League states that Sedlar in the film publicly denied and significantly reduced the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, primarily directed against members ...
The world has suddenly realised that there is a “refugee crisis”. There are more refugees now than at any time since World War II. The number has grown three-fold since the end of 2001. The problem is treated as if it arose just recently, but it has been a long time coming. The pressure has been building and building until it has burst the dams of wilful ignorance.Death and despair has migrated to the doorsteps of Europe. But tens of millions of people do not simply abandon home and native land for an insecure dangerous future of desperate struggle. The ...
Hardly any knowledgeable person doubts that Zionist ideology is the purest form of racism. Zionism is Jewish disguised racism as a raison d’etat. Israel comes right after the U. S., as far as racism is concerned. That is why the U. S. donates to this racist regime $ 3.8 bn per year in order to keep this occupation regime going. Should anybody doubt the racism of the Israeli leadership, read the following article.[1]Racism among the Israeli leadership is legendary. It started out with the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, saying: “Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it ...
Yada…yada…yada. The discussion on the unprovoked and planned aggression by Georgia on South Ossetia is futile and moot because Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced last week that the Russian Government would recognize the independence and freedom of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. On August 25, 2008, both houses of the Russian Parliament or Duma voted unanimously to recognize the independence of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. On August 26, 2008, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced that the government of the Russian Federation officially recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.Save your rhetoric. Georgia has lost those areas permanently. Ossetians and ...
As was expected, President Trump has decertified Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal or, to give it its full name, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), despite the fact that he certified it twice before. As recently as 14 September 2017, Trump also waived certain sanctions against Iran as required under the terms of the deal. Yet, in an extremely belligerent and hostile speech, he put out his new policy towards Iran.The certification of the deal is not part of the agreement, but as anti-Iranian hawks in both parties wanted to undermine President Barrack Obama and create obstacles on ...
A massive destruction of the Ottoman (Orthodox Christian) Armenian population in 1915−1916 is probably the greatest atrocity committed during the WWI and for sure a first 20th century case of the genocide as up to 1.500.000 ethnic Armenians were executed by the Ottoman authorities and their collaborators (the Kurds). As a consequence, the survivors are scattered across the globe. Today it is already a century old event, but the issue of the 1915−1916 Armenian Genocide is undoubtedly still alive and divisive political issue firstly between the Armenians and the Turks[1] but also and among the western “liberal democracies” on the ...
‘Blowing from a Gun’ depicted by Vasily Vereshchagin in his painting ‘Suppression of the Indian Revolt by the English’ on the rebellion of 1857. Queen Victoria’s agent bought this painting, in an attempt to suppress it. ‘Blowing from the Gun’ was a means of execution where the prisoner is tied to the muzzle of a cannon, which is then fired, popping the victim’s head about 15 meters (50 feet) into the air, apparently a sort of juvenile entertainment for the colonizers.Following colonization, along came ‘decolonization’ and what do you suppose happened with colonial borders? They mostly remained as laid down ...
After the catastrophic attacks of September 11 2001 monumental sorrow and a feeling of desperate and understandable anger began to permeate the American psyche. A few people at that time attempted to promote a balanced perspective by pointing out that the United States had also been responsible for causing those same feelings in people in other nations, but they produced hardly a ripple. Although Americans understand in the abstract the wisdom of people around the world empathizing with the suffering of one another, such a reminder of wrongs committed by our nation got little hearing and was soon overshadowed by ...
The Greek Genocide (or Ottoman Greek Genocide) refers to the systematic extermination of the native Greek subjects of the Ottoman Empire before, during and after World War I (1914-1923). It was instigated by successive governments of the Ottoman Empire; the Committee of Union and Progress Party (C.U.P), and the Turkish Nationalist Movement of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. It included massacres, forced deportations and death marches, summary expulsions, boycotts, rape, forced conversion to Islam, conscription into labor battalions, arbitrary executions, and destruction of Christian Orthodox cultural, historical and religious monuments. According to various sources, approximately 1 million Ottoman Greeks perished during this period.The first ...
The Christian population that had made up one fifth of the Ottoman Empire’s population was wiped out in waves of violence by successive Ottoman and Turkish republican governments that left Christians a tiny minority in Anatolia, two Israeli scholars have said in a new study.The controversy over the killings of the Armenian Christian minority living in Anatolia during the last days of the Ottoman Empire is already well known – while the majority of the scholarly community and many international states recognise the killings as genocide, Turkey accepts that killings took place but rejects they constituted a genocide.Israeli historians Benny ...
To gauge the transformation in the response by the U.S. military, the mainstream media and the public to a U.S. war crime, one need only compare the reactions to two of the most heinous American crimes: the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the gunning down of innocent Iraqis on a Baghdad street in 2007.The latter was captured on a cockpit video from attacking Apache helicopters and revealed in a video released by WikiLeaks ten years ago today. Wikileaks obtained the video from a conscientious U.S. Army intelligence analyst, Chelsea Manning. The My Lai incident was revealed to the public ...
Our Planet Earth is heading straight towards the most dangerous collision in its history. It is not a collision with some foreign body, with an asteroid or a comet, but with the most brutal and selfish chunk of its own inhabitants: with people who proudly call themselves “members of the Western civilization.”Again and again it is clearly demonstrated that Western culture, which the paramount psychologist Carl Jung used to call “pathology”, couldn’t be trusted.This “culture” had already mercilessly slaughtered several hundreds of millions of people in all corners of the world; it enslaved entire continents, and plundered all that had ...
Fourteen years ago the U.S. Government de-classified the now famous “La Vista Report” of May 15, 1947, a top-secret U.S. Army Intelligence report documenting the Vatican’s role in aiding the escape of numerous high-ranking Nazi war criminals, among them Ante Pavelic, fascist leader of wartime Croatia; Franz Stangel, Commander of Treblinka; Eduard Roschmann, “the Butcher of Riga”; Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyon”; SS General Walter Rauff, inventor of the mobile gas truck; Adolf Eichmann, “architect of the Holocaust”; and tens of thousands of others. Writing about the document prior to its release, internationally renowned Nazi hunter Charles R. Allen ...
I follow the evolution of the war in the Ukraine. The New York Times keeps updating the war by the hour. And while I decry the violence of the war, I cannot overlook the hypocrisy of the West, that is, the American-led NATO military alliance encircling Russia.The West blessed the Turkish invasion of CyprusMy mind rushes to 1974 when NATO, primarily America and England, authorized Turkey, a NATO “ally,” to invade Cyprus, a Greek island that had the misfortune of having a Moslem Turkish minority and British military bases.In order to make the Turkish invasion easy, the Americans ordered Greece ...