re: #356 Cobdenite

I thought that the Armenian Genocide was still a bit of an open question. One of the most well-respected historians of the Middle East of the “old school”, Bernard Lewis, shied away from defining it as a Genocide (if only because it wasn’t explicit government policy unlike the Final Solution, for example).

If Lewis said that, it was based on insufficient documentary evidence. The Armenian Genocide was, in fact, directed by the Ottoman government. Taner Ahkam (a Turk) wrote “A Shameful Act” based in part on the evidence which Lewis didn’t have. The deniers don’t have a leg to stand on.

The excusers have a slightly stronger case. It was Russian policy to get Orthodox minorities in Ottoman land to rebel. This worked very well in the Balkans. In Turkish Armenia, the Orthodox were more in the minority, but they did funnel a lot of intelligence over to the Russians in 1915-1916. The Turks did have legitimate cause to do something; it wasn’t mindless bigotry, or religiously-motivated “jihad”. (Although they did end up telling their Kurds irregulars who did most of the wetwork that it was a jihad.)

Where the excusers go wrong is in saying that genocide was an appropriate solution to this problem.