Understanding Genocide and our Remembrance as Greeks
In Asia Minor, also known as Anatolia — there were the Pontian Greeks who lived along the coast of the Black Sea, and the Thracians and the westernized Ionian Greeks, who lived along the seashore facing the Aegean [...]
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 just west of present-day Istanbul.
And then there’s the case of Smyrna and September 14, the day every year during which memorial services and events are held to remember the tragic events that culminated in September 1922, when hundreds of thousands of Greeks were massacred or forced to flee as refugees from their ancestral homes in Western Anatolia.
The Pontian Genocide, the Thracian Genocide, the Asia Minor Catastrophe— and add to that the Armenians and the Assyrians— other Christian groups once living and thriving in what was the crumbling Ottoman Empire in the early 1900s and you have a confusing mix of history— sometimes even competing with each other— when what was was really happening, was a single, orchestrated annihilation of a single religion of people— Christians.
But for reasons of brevity, I emphasize the Greeks alone, as I continue my post.
The comparison of the Holocaust in Europe during World War II and the Genocide of the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1900s couldn’t be more direct.
You had a single mad man named Adolph Hitler who wanted to “clean” the continent of a single religion of people, Jews, who they themselves were divided by nationality, culture, language, even worship practice— but united as Jews. There were Ukranian Jews and Polish Jews and in Greece alone the Romaniotes and the Sephardic Jews.
And in the then Ottoman Empire, you had another crazed leader named Kemal Ataturk who, like Hitler, planned his own murderous rampage seeking to create a “Turkey for the Turks” with no place for people who were different— i.e., the Greeks (and other Christian minorities including the Armenians and Assyrians).
In Asia Minor, also known as Anatolia— there were the Pontian Greeks who lived along the coast of the Black Sea, and the Thracians and the westernized Ionian Greeks, who lived along the seashore facing the Aegean. And there were other, lesser-known communities too, who lived in the interior of Turkey, like the Cappodocians.
Each had their distinct dialects, food traditions and even worship traditions as some of these communities had adopted Turkish as their native and worship languages (like U.S. communities of Greeks have adopted English as theirs) but liturgies were still Greek Orthodox in faith and tradition.
But they were all Greeks— like the Jews of Europe.
The confusing ethnic and regional differences have, over the years, created a disjointed effort to remember, document and recognize the single mass atrocity that took place in the beginning of the 20th century— that of a systematic wiping out of entire populations of Greek people in the early stages of the building of modern day Turkey by its founder, Kemal Ataturk.
One website, which has done extensive research and documentation is seeking to set the record straight— and even called out my own efforts of recognizing the Pontian Genocide last week on this website.
The Greek Genocide Resource Center sent me an email, stating that “By calling for the recognition of a genocide only in the one region where it occurred, ie. Pontus, Pontic Greeks are effectively ignoring the suffering of all other Greeks that fell victim during the Genocide.”
At first glance, my knee-jerk reaction was one of disgust. “Can’t we all just get along?” I thought to myself. Unity has not been our best trait as a nation of people, I thought.
But at further notice and more reading— confirming what I already knew and also seeing a Facebook post by the same author of the email, it made perfect sense. The Greek Genocide Resource Center posted the following on their Facebook page just one day before Pontian Greeks were preparing to recognize and mourn their dead.
“Last month we commemorated the genocide of the Greeks from Eastern Thrace, today we commemorate the victims from Pontus, and on September 14 we will once again commemorate more victims of the Greek Genocide, those from western Asia Minor. There were many victims of the Greek Genocide, and for certain reasons Greeks prefer to mourn their ancestors based on region. What this has created is a disjointed effort for recognition. Pontic Greeks, considered the first to use the term genocide to describe the mass killing of Greeks in the former Ottoman Empire, have sought and received a day of mourning for their own victims, and till this day, continue to seek recognition solely for the victims of Pontus. This bias belittles and belies the true suffering of all the victims who were after all – GREEKS. Today we mourn the loss of many. This page at least, will continue to seek a SINGLE recognition for ALL the victims regardless of where they lived. We ask that all fair minded people look through the division and work to do the same. It was a GREEK Genocide.”
It was a single genocide. Plain and simple.
Of course, seeking to minimize one, over the other, is not the answer and seeking to bring together scholars, activists and societies of regional Greeks (i.e. Pontians, Smyrniots, Thracians and other descendants of all Anatolian Greeks) could prove next to impossible, let alone a futile effort.
Because we are a ferociously proud— but splintered people. Cretans are proud of their Cretan lineage, and Pontians are proud of their own culture and history. The Arcadians and Laconians thrive as sub-cultures of a sub-culture of Peloponesians— and so on.
And this is not to say that the Pontians, the Smyrniots and others shouldn’t continue mourning their dead and remembering their ancestors’ sacrifices, the same way Ukrainian and Polish Jews commemorate their own very specific massacres. The difference being, of course, that it’s always under the umbrella of “The Holocaust” for them. And for us, we seek Congressional resolutions, city council proclamations and other official-type of recognitions in disjointed and individualistic efforts, NOT as a single Genocidal event, but as individual, regional efforts.
The Jews were able to unite their historians and communities from the ashes of World War II and create a single, unified campaign to inform the world of The Holocaust— a single, systematic effort by Nazi Germany to annihilate all Jews— Greek, Italian, Sephardic, Polish and dozens of other sub-cultures thriving under one umbrella of Judaism in Europe.
Will the Greeks ever be able to unite under a single GREEK effort that will bridge the gap amongst a confusing— yet single and systematic effort that took place between 1914 and 1922 to annihilate Greeks— regardless of region— from Anatolia?
I certainly hope so and the education and documentation that was provided to me by the Greek Genocide Resource Center has helped me to better understand that like The Holocaust, the genocide of Asia Minor’s Greeks— the Pontians, the Ionians, the Thracians and others— was a single, devastating, brutal campaign targeting Greeks.
And while we shouldn’t forget or minimize our individual efforts— perhaps it’s time— a century after these brutal and devastating events— to call it what it is— a GREEK GENOCIDE.
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.
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 ...
While the numbers are not as high as Auschwitz or Treblinka, Jasenovac was notorious for its cruelty and the high number of young children who were victims.April 22 is a date that binds two groups of people who shared the same tragic fate. It is the date that commemorates the revolt of the prisoners of Jasenovac, the death camp that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Serbs and Roma.While the numbers are not as high as Auschwitz or Treblinka, Jasenovac was notorious for its cruelty and the high number of young children who were victims. The saddest ...
Historical research into the Nazi era rarely throws up many surprises any more. German historian Stefan Ihrig, however, is an exception to this rule. By studying long-published sources, he has uncovered the fascination that Ataturk's modern Turkey held for the German far right, which has been seriously underestimated until now and which set an example for Hitler and the National Socialists.From a right-wing viewpoint, what Ataturk had achieved was an unattainable goal for Weimar-era Germany. Using force of arms, he had managed to reverse the Treaty of Sevres, which had been forced on his country by the Entente in 1920, ...
LONDON — Seventy years after he was shot by the Soviets, the reputation of Jonas Noreika goes on trial in Lithuania next week.Noreika — a hero to many in the Baltic state for resisting the Communists’ subjugation of their country — stands accused of being a Nazi collaborator who was complicit in the Holocaust.Jonas Noreika - "General Storm"The case before the Vilnius Regional Administrative Court charges the state-funded Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania with intentionally distorting the role of Noreika in the murder of Jews.It has been brought by Grant Gochin, a Lithuanian citizen living in the US, ...
There are horrific realities of history that must not be questioned, distorted or denied by anyone with even the slightest integrity or sense of decency.The slaughter of millions of Jews in the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec, Chelmno and Sobibor during the Holocaust of World War II falls squarely in this category.So does the fundamental fact that this ultimate crime against humanity was perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its multinational fascist accomplices.Any attempt to deny or to attempt to trivialise or minimise the enormity of this genocide, or to rehabilitate its perpetrators in any way whatsoever, is, simply ...
The Kaunas Garage Massacre of the Jews in June 1941It was with great interest that I read the op-ed jointly penned by Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi and his Lithuanian counterpart, Gabrielius Landsbergis, in last Friday’s Jerusalem Post. As could be expected, such initiatives are usually written to offer a rosy picture of the wonderful relations between two countries and the bright prospects for future cooperation. As a descendant of Lithuanian Jews, a frequent visitor to Lithuania ever since independence, and the co-author of a recent book on the rampant Holocaust distortion orchestrated by successive Lithuanian governments, I didn’t know whether to ...
What is wrong with the American people? After several years of horrific policy toward the waking world, democracy’s standard bearers seem to be drowning in a lake of selfishness. Distracted, apathetic, or simply dumbed and numbed by unrelenting propaganda, the most admired society on Earth has turned to a wriggling mush of diverging ideals. I fear that American have become what we ultimately deplored, just another despicable cultural hegemony. Here’s a short brief on the matter.A recent article by James Carden at The Nation prompted me to discuss this unsavory truth today. The title of the piece, “Trump’s Syria Policy: ...
The image of Srebrenica tells us more about the reality of the majority of the media and of course the “Muslim victim card” is being used in order to cleanse the Bosniak Muslims. After all, from enslaving Orthodox Christians during their brotherly love with the Turkish slave masters of the Ottoman Empire to having Muslim SS units who supported Adolf Hitler; then “victimhood” is needed in order to justify their history and culture.Of course the wishy-washy brigade will tell us that the Ottoman period was enlightened and that the system of taking the eldest Christian boy (devshirme system) in the ...
North from Nazareth’s city limits, a mile or so as the crow flies, is an agricultural community by the name of Tzipori – Hebrew for “bird.” It is a place I visit regularly, often alongside groups of activists wanting to learn more about the political situation of the Palestinian minority living in Israel.Tzipori helps to shed light on the core historic, legal and administrative principles underpinning a Jewish state, ones that reveal it to be firmly in a tradition of non-democratic political systems that can best be described as apartheid in nature.More than a decade ago, former U.S. president Jimmy ...
Armenians and others around the world this month are marking the centennial of the genocide that left hundreds of thousands of Armenians dead early in the last century. The date April 24 is typically picked as the centennial day since it was on that day in 1915 that Turkish authorities rounded up Armenian intellectuals and leaders in Constantinople and murdered them.It was the first step in a much broader slaughter. The Armenian centennial is getting the attention it deserves from sources as diverse as Pope Francis and Kim Kardashian. The Pope courageously used the word “genocide” in a mass this ...
The Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Center is pleased to announce a new book, Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, 1913-1923. Edited by George N. Shirinian. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017. 433 pages.The final years of the Ottoman Empire were catastrophic for its non-Turkish, non-Muslim minorities. From 1913 to 1923, its rulers deported, killed, or otherwise persecuted staggering numbers of men, women and children in an attempt to preserve “Turkey for the Turks,” setting a modern precedent for how a regime can commit genocide against its own citizens in pursuit of political ends, while ...
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 ...
My refusal to believe ongoing Western media reports of “Russian aggression” makes me a “Kremlin troll”. My punishment for not towing the “party line” – simple, effective “shunning” by Western media – has not, however, diminished my ongoing commitment to seeing the other side.Having previously investigated the Crimean reunification with Russia, this May I turned my attention to the birth of two new government formations in Eastern Ukraine, the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and the Lugansk People’s Republic (LNR). Americans only hear either what Kiev “reports”, or the US propaganda machine puts out – these are puppet regimes born of ...
Turkish-US relations have faced many serious stress tests over the past 50 years. The catalyst in overcoming those crises was making strategic considerations, which always underlined the dependence of the two NATO allies on each other, regardless of their differences.These strategic considerations appear to be weakening now, as the regional priorities of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey and the United States no longer overlap, and in many cases conflict with each other.That is certainly the case in Syria, where the two countries are at odds over Washington’s alliance with Syrian Kurdish groups against the Islamic State (IS). Ankara insists these groups are ...
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 ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe 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.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]
Most people have no idea of who is pictured above, but you should. The sight of this man should cause a similar revulsion to that of seeing Mussolini, Mao, Stalin or Hitler, as he committed an African genocide that resulted in the killing of over 10 million people in the Congo.His name is King Leopold II of Belgium.Most of the people never learned about him in school, and have also most likely never heard about him in the media either. This is because he’s not included in the popular narrative of oppression (which includes things like U.S. slavery and the ...
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 ...
After the Russian military victory over the Ottoman Empire in the 1877−1878 Russo-Ottoman War it was signed the San Stefano Treaty between these two states on March 3rd, 1878. According to the treaty, a Greater “San Stefano” Bulgaria, under the direct protection by Russia, had to be established within the borders of the Ottoman Empire. However, an idea of “San Stefano Bulgaria” directly affected three Balkan nations: the Serbs, Greeks and Albanians as some of their ethnic and historical territories had to become part of a Greater Bulgaria. The “San Stefano Bulgaria” was projected by the Russian authorities to cover ...
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 magazine is covering the research gaps uncovered by global Western hoax mainstream media platforms and academic teaching & research institutions.
This is an alternative information & academic research digest platform with the purpose to offer an alternative “another side of the truth”.
The magazine is independent, private, and free of any influence by any institution, organization, government, or pressure group. URL: www.global-politics.eu
Of course, seeking to minimize one, over the other, is not the answer and seeking to bring together scholars, activists and societies of regional Greeks (i.e. Pontians, Smyrniots, Thracians and other descendants of all Anatolian Greeks) could prove next to impossible, let alone a futile effort.
