This edit by Ruzgar has lasted twelve days and counting, untouched. Here is Wikipedia's account of the Armenian Genocide, as told in the World War I article:



Yikes. Back in the day I would've WP:SOFIX'd it, but now I think the worse it gets the better. Maybe people will learn to stay away.

fixed.

Yeah, please when you post stuff like this can you help us out? I'm not familiar with the Armenian genocide, and hence don't know what I'm looking for.

Sure. The point is not so much that this specific article needed fixing, but that the system doesn't work if a mistake of this magnitude can sit around basically indefinitely.

Anyway about the Armernians. They had been living in eastern Anatolia (the Asian part of Turkey) and the Caucasus Mountains for thousands of years, and converted to Christianity somewhere along the way. In the late 1800's, Americans began taking a special interest in them. Missionaries were sent, schools were set up, and much ado was made in the newspapers about "starving Armenians". About the same time the Turkish reaction to them was mixed. With a good sultan, Armenians would achieve important positions in business and building. With a bad sultan, mobs would kill a few hundred people now and then, and things were not so good.

Also during the late 1800's, early 1900's the Turks had to watch their empire disintegrate as one minority after another decided to go its own way. During WWI, they feared that the Armenians would break away and set up an independent state or be absorbed by Russia. So rather than run the chance of this happening, they demanded that the males work in labor battalions during the war. Then they decided this wasn't enough, and they killed many people and forced many to walk into the desert in Syria, where there wasn't enough food or fresh water and they just died on their own without having to be shot or bayonetted.

After this had been going on for a while, some of the few remaining Armenians resisted at the city of Van, and managed to hold out until the Russians came, and this is where the Turkish accusations of insurrection and collaboration with the Russians come from. The problem with this theory is that the Armenians didn't really start resisting until *after* so many had been massacred or shipped off to die in the desert. When the Russians fell to pieces in 1918 Van had to be evacuated.

All told, the estimates do vary, but since you're asking me I'll tell you I think the number is probably around a million deaths, with >99% of them being people who were guilty of nothing more than being Christian and a minority in a large empire. The Armenian presence in their ancestral homeland was pretty much extinguished. Modern Armenia is to the east of where most of the Armenians lived.

For more info check out The Burning Tigris, by Peter Balakian.

Religion was rather a vehicule than the cause. The real reason was more complex. Armenians were basically controlling half of the economy. Soon during the war, in the winter of 1914-15 the Ottoman recieved a pretty much severe defeat on the Russian front. Realising the inevitable probable loss of the Arabic part of the Empire, it realised that the minority remaining (the Kurds were still not an issue) were the Armenians and that after a simple evacuation and an Ottoman defeat, they'll return. From their point of view it was that their nation will be controlled by the Armenians after that defeat. So what they did was to undo Armenians circulation permit and evacuate them to the interior (not allowed to leave the Empire) in the desert, then the government in Alepo will recieve a circular telegram to return the survivers back in the desert but they were met by the resistance of the Arabs who refused to give in Armenians. The Mecca Sharif ordered to the Arabs a protection of the Armenians under their control, those were the remaining survivers of Syria and Lebanon.

So it is not really accurate to limit this into a Christian-Muslim subject, those who planned it weren't even practicing Muslims. The Armenian existance in that land happened to be in contradiction with several of the Ittihadist plans such as the nationalisation of the economy, mostly opposed by the Armenians. Then after the severe defeat in the hand of the Russians the Turks took the thing as saving their fatherland and Armenians happened to be considered as an enemy who could not intergrate in the mass unlike the Kurds. The Ittihadist will be using religion to manipulate the mass and contol it, in one instance in the East an Imam will be even murdered because he was opposing the Armenian evacuation and massacres.

About Van, in Van in 1918 it was not only resistance, there were act of vengence and indeed Armenians have burned Muslim villages and committed massacres. Most of it were commited by male survivors who escaped to the Russian Empire to then return to find out that there was no traces of Armenians left there. They took the occasion, when they had the upper hand to commit massacres. Probably less than 10,000 people, had they had the occasion they would have probably killed more. But the typical Anatolian villages were small with a couple of families, they were very badly placed to kill much more than that. The only way of killing a large number of people there, it would have been to deport and isolate a population, the way it was done with the Armenians and the Assyrians also, who were much too implamented in the Armenian community that the Ittihadists considered them the same as Armenians.

The Van resistance relate more to the April 1915 resistance when its governor Jevdet ordered every male of Van to be murdered. It's largelly exagerated mostly by Armenians who have presented it as such a heroic act, but when the Russians arrived a significant part of the Armenian population of Van was murdered. Ussher (American Physician stationed at Van) in his memoire relate to what happened there.

Apropos of nothing, the Armenians have their own wiki now:

http://www.armeniapedia.org

It's quite extensive, actually! I don't think the Turks have one (yet), but I suppose it's just a matter of time.

More to the point, it is against the law to deny the Armenian Genocide in France. To do so means big fines and prjson terms.

The next time WP denies that this was indeed a genocide, file suit with Floflo as the responsible party (under French Law, she's the one who has to take the criminal rap, if there is was)...rinse and repeat, if necessary.

Um, no. No, that's completely garbled and wrong. You'd have to be pretty gullible to buy the Turkish apology.

Not yet illegal, the law has yet not been approved. I hope it will never be approved. It is one thing from a government to recognize it, which I support strongly, but to make laws controling academic positions is plain wrong.

I don't buy Turkish apology. The Ittihadists really saw Armenians as controlling the empire and they took the evacuation decision to not only get rid of the population but also eliminate them. This was basically why they were not permitted to leave the empire. For those controling the government during the war, merely deporting the outside of the empire would have been dangerous because after the war the'd come back and would take control of what remained of the Ottoman Empire(from their perspective). So elimination was the only solution, but from their (Turks) own perspective it was to preserve their own fatherland, so it was justified.

While The Burning Tigris might be a good read, a better read would be ''A Shameful Act'' by the Turkish scholar Taner Akçam, it relate to the event from the perspective of the officials. Several Turkish scholars who aknowledge the event are recently providing interesting inside to the event.

Holocaust denial is illegal in several countries, and can (and does) lead to jail terms. Even falsely accusing someone of holocaust denial can and has led to jail terms in some countries.

Whilst the Armenian Genocide is somewhat less (with apologies to the Armenians), it stands to reason that if Holocaust denial can lead to jail terms, then so can denying the Armenian Genocide.

Of course, in saying that, I agree with you that speech should never be able to lead to jail terms. You should be free to make any kind of intellectual decision, no matter how stupid it might be. It is really thought police to control this kind of thing. Who does it hurt because you have an opinion that is wrong? I am sure that we are all wrong on lots of things. Should you go to jail because you have an opinion that is wrong? We'd all be in jail if that was the case.

Well, I do think that there should be laws against hate speech. If I write that Jews and Blacks should be eliminated, then I should be answered by being brought to court and no amount of ''freedom of speech'' argument should excuse my act. On the other hand if I say that the Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide did not happen, I should have the right to say so without being brought to court. But sometimes the bounderies are hard to establish. For instance the distinction between revisionism and denialism, acting as proxy to reverse academic concensus like in the case of Faurisson is just more than ''revisionism'' because the aim is to reverse academic concensus and different than intellectual honesty and integrity. In the cases of the Armenian Genocide, Justin McCarthy would be a denialist, while Zurcher is a revisionist, his criticisms are constructive and honest.

The problem with such laws like in the cases of Holocaust denial, is that they give dangerous precendent. Take Turkey for instance, where aknowledging the Armenian Genocide can be considered as a criminal offense under the Penal Code 301.

Some followup:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=210182404



Someone's added a second paragraph with the Turkish viewpoint. (Seems the end of the first paragraph wasn't enough). Additionally, you've got a New York Times reference, which if you bother to read you will find is from 1896. You've also got the Turkish sob story that they were driven out of the Balkans and Russia and why doesn't anyone cry for them? I'm not sure how that has anything to do with a large overview article about WWI, but hey, maybe making the "connection" and rationalizing bad things is the way to go.

By the way, who really thinks that anyone in Russia, Serbia, or Greece has really forgotten or is "ignorant of" the fact that Muslims were expelled from their countries?