if this forum is for searching truths, i want to contribute

[1.5 million]

Also i must congratulate you, you are spending all your time to this untrue genocide .And you prepared very very much things to be convincing.Realy i congratulate you.I think we Turks must spend more time to defend ourselves. We Turks are working for our country, we don't try to despise the orhers, we only work for this beautiful country.And you must work for your country too...Armenia has very bad economy why don't you spend your time for your country's economy ,for your people..Give up to slander about Turks!

Very typical...."just go away and leave us alone" you say...well...imagine how we feel...our people were brutally killed and those like you take the effort to deny it, to lie and defend the guilty....for this you deserve death - that is how I feel. Have a nice day now.

[1.5 million]

I can understand what our ancestors were feeling about you.. i can understand what armenians made to our ancestors, and they had to send them to Syria. It is imposible to leave with you

You are irratated by Armenians - they are different then you - you would like to kill us all...eh?

[Bulgarian]

Also i must congratulate you, you are spending all your time to this untrue genocide .And you prepared very very much things to be convincing.Realy i congratulate you.I think we Turks must spend more time to defend ourselves. We Turks are working for our country, we don't try to despise the orhers, we only work for this beautiful country.And you must work for your country too...Armenia has very bad economy why don't you spend your time for your country's economy ,for your people..Give up to slander about Turks!

So you admit your going to deny the genocide because Turkey does. I suppose if Turkey organises massacres against the remain Greek and Armenians within Turkey your going to join the massacres.

What will happen if in 20 years time or even 30 years time Turkey recognises this "the so-called genocide lie"? Will you still deny it?

What does trying to get the genocide of your people recognised have to do with the economy? Recognising the genocide is about justice (adalet).

[1.5 million]

when Turks wanted to send them to Syria, what were armenians doing?Were they collecting pears from tree?

I suppose we should ask Hitler the same question concerning his victims eh?

[1.5 million]

This was the post of a Turkish friend of mine to another Turk on a forum

Don't dodge the issue Ismet.
July 15 2001 at 2:30 PM Marquis

Denying what was done to Armenians is not only a serious issue, it's disgusting. It's up to Turks like us to take responsibility for our history, and not only for the glorious parts, but also for the criminal parts.

[1.5 million]

An exchange I had with another Turk on another forum...

...he invited me to his recent wedding BTW...

Originally posted by aurguplu:
[QB] allow me to add one observation that i made about turkey that western educated people find a bit hard to understand:

in the west, you have had pronounced political identities for quite some time. people embraced ideas and not people. there were relatively well educated populations, the principles and foundations of the states were reasonably well laid out, and people tended to follow them to varying degrees. not so with turkey. when you look at the last century of the empire, especially the last decades, you see quite clearly that people who proclaimed themselves adherents of this or that political idea had in fact very little sound knowledge of the ideas they said - and thought - they were embracing. these people typically took some of the more salient features of various western ideological currents, and pretty much ignored the rest. i hope i am not straying from the subject, but i am a historical linguist by training, and an avid reader of the world's classics (though i have not raed them all yet: this is a lifetime project). islam ceased to be an intellectually productive civilisation at about the time the ottomans came on the scene (they don't have to do anything with it, the thing just got ossified) and the ottomans were in a sense the romans of islam: very effective soldiers, brilliant organisers, and no innovators: no ottoman philosopy, no ottoman science, no original ottoman literature etc. by the 19th century ottoman intellectual life was a desert, and it was getting pretty obvious that a return to the glorious islamic past was no solution. so we turned to the west. but we took the mechanical achievements of the west (military technology, the exact sciences etc.) and paid scant attention to the deeper philosopical undrecurrents that made the west the west. throughout the ottoman period, there was a great dearth of the translation of the western classics for instance (and imagine that there was practically no printing activity prior to the 1870s). learning foreign languages, unless they were arabic or persian, was never the turks's forte or inclination, and consequently you had a largely monolingual elite with only very partial and heavily censored access to western ideas. these people could not have absorbed various western ideologies and grasped their principles thoroughly. and indeed, they hadn't. so it is pretty dangerous from the point of accuracy to use the suffix -ist within the turkish context. [/QB]

me - Super points – and understood.

Originally posted by aurguplu:
[QB]instead, when you look at the problems they faced and the "solutions" they came up with, you see a very strong ad hoc component there: "this failed, let's try that. oh sh*t, we are in a fine mess, c'mon let's get out of it as soon as we can. we cannot have the luxury to make long-term plans, let's save the day (and our face)" and you see this pervasive ad hoc dominated and unprincipled approach to any problem, not only the major things like the armenian question, but minor affairs like the everyday running of some state department.

this is one of the main reasons why i oppose expanations such as the young turks planned the genocide way before, and that the war served as a cover. the war may indeed have served as a cover, but for god's sake, enver sent 90,000 troops to sarkamish in the dead of the winter in summer clothing! and this is the minister of war of the ottoman empire! as we say in turkish, he was so maladroit that he could not guide two geese to the water and come back with both of them! what could this guy plan in advance?

frankly, even though the above might be an exaggeration, the fact that they were not particularly good planners stands from their record. and i despise these guys so much that i cannot bear the though of them being given credit for abilities they decidedly did not possess, such as planning. they sank the six centuries old empire in six years, a**eholes! what was the point of getting into wwi? [/QB]

me - Understood. While the ultimate actions may have been somewhat ad hoc and developed as they occurred – I still believe that these men planned their violence/aggression upon the Armenians – even if its final form developed as it went (and I could argue the same even for Hitler and his “Final Solution”)

And remember these same men somehow successfully planned and executed a revolution and take over of an Empire. These same men managed to seize control of the State apparatus throughout the Empire. These same men managed to place their people in charge of Villyets and of towns and such and these same men managed to clear the entirety of Anatolia of 2 Million + Armenians in a matter of what - 4 or 5 months? These same men managed to hold the Western Powers at bay while they did this deed and they managed to do so in a manner to largely avoid prosecution and punishment after the fact – even though they also lost a very ill conceived war. And these same men managed to profit greatly from these events and put themselves in position to be necessary factors for the Kemalists - politically and economically – and they well entrenched themselves after this point. So I argue that these men were not entirely incapable. In fact they have done a fair job escaping justice and making out like bandits and continue to basically thumb their noses at the rest of the world. So if you think you are angry (and you well should be) – imagine how we Armenians must feel.

Originally posted by aurguplu:
[QB]sorry i got heated up a bit, an in the excitement of the moment, some of my assertions might have been slightly exaggerated and a bit wanting in accuracy. but the gist of my position, i hope, is clear.

i'll address your other points later on, with a cooler head.

take care friend, [/QB]

me - No problem – you always raise good points. And it is valuable for Armenians to be exposed to Turkish viewpoints – we see enough totally uniformed and inflexible ones – so yours is a welcome relief – and we all have very much to learn. Cheers!

[1.5 million]

Another exchange with the same Turk above - interesting eh?

Could you please tell me what factors led you to accept the Genocide?

what factors led me to accept the genocide:

a) my family has played a role in turkish affairs for quite a while now, including before, during and after 1915, and i was exposed to "alternative" versions of history very early on.

b) the wet nurse of a member of our family had lost two sons in the "kıyım", as a senior member of my family had told me.

c) a member of my family, when he was a teenager, had had to travel from some place in anatolia to istanbul (or was it vice versa?) in 1915-1916. their cart was stopped by the chetes en route and all males ordered to get out. they were then told that no turkish adult male shall pass that gorge without first killing an armenian. that member of my family was about 12 at the time, so he was saved. several others were not that lucky: they were taken behind the hill and some time later two shots were heard. then they were sent back to the cart and the cart was allowed to continue.

one of these unlucky ones was a senior member of the CUP and a party ideologue. he did not open his mouth all the way to their destination.

d) my (english) arabic tutor at oxford, whom i have always been very fond of, used to make jokes about the armenian genocide with other tutors in front of me saying things like "when the germans organised it for them".

a, b, and c are confirmations of killings rather than the genocide. many turkish families have similar stories to tell, and the killings themselves have never really been denied. what was denied was that the whole thing was a state-engineered attempt to specifically eliminate, or drastically reduce the armenian nation in turkey. d was an eye opener, and it led me to read a bit more on it while abroad (those days it wasn't advisable to nose about asking for things armenian in turkey), and of course, several salient facts emerged:

i) there were some 18 million people in anatolia in 1914, some 1.3 million of which (by our own account) were armenian. after the war, there were 12 million people in anatolia, some 70,000 of which were armenian. looks like something pretty bad has happened to the armenians, doesn't it?

ii) the turkish parliamentary archives were then closed from 1915 onwards. if you had something to hide about the foundation of the republic, 1919 at the earliest would be a more likely date. why 1915?

iii) armenians in turkish history books make a brief appearance in WWI, when they betray us in favour of the russians, kill us, and then disappear. no word before, no word after. a bit enigmatic. makes you ask for more info.

iv) i don't know how early i acquired it, but like most turks, i knew from very early on that "something very bad" had gone on between the turks and the armenians, and therefore the two peoples had an invisible wall between them. even turkish children as young as six are to some degree aware of this "something very bad".

well, how i came to accept the genocide. i had had to accept a number of ugly facts in life, some about people i knew, others about my nation, others about other things. i have a tendency to stop as soon as i realise that whatever intellectual exercise that i am doing is self-deception/wishful thinking etc. you had 18 m people, 1.3 m of whom were armenian. today you have 70 m people, 70,000 of whom are armenian. if you put it this blunt, i.e. call a spade a spade, you can't ecsape the conclusion that it was a genocide.

of course you cannot "prove" or "disprove" that it was a genocide, as authenticated first hand documents are not there (the archives of the CUP are lost and orders at any rate were very probably oral). but there comes a point when you realise that the genocide explanation is far more plausible and simpler than anything that the establishment makes up.

i can tell from my own experience that the best way to make a turk accept the fact is to make expose him to three versions of the story (armenian, turkish, third party: german is best). the more you try to force it upon them, the more they will feel compelled to deny because he will feel that he personally is being charged.

another factor is the land claims business. the main reason why turkey keeps denying the whole thing is the land claims, and as long as the persist (or are tied to the genocide claims) the future of the issue is bleak. the overwhelming majority of turks have no doubt whatsoever that the genocide claims are just a scam to take half of turkey away, and then the kurds will come along, then the greeks, and it will be sevres. it is extremely important to understand this, as many turks don't just make this up as a way to evade the genocide issue, but genuinely believe it, and let's face it, the armenian side habitually ties one issue to the other.

if you got some educating to do, perhaps the best advice i can give you is always to keep in mind that the other side really believes what he says. don't say something like he is lying, but rather that he has got his facts wrong. put the facts before him and then ask him what he thinks happened. i had put my facts before him and arrived at the genocide conclusion on my own.

--------------------
ali


i forgot to add:

there are references to the killings being part o a genocidal plan in the turkish literature of, or concerning, the period, written as memoirs (one example i can come up with is the "zeytindağı" (mount of olives) of falih rıfkı atay). as far as i know there is quite some evidence in such works written by turks that the state was behind the killings one way or the other.

take care,

--------------------
ali

[1.5 million]

And another - with a totally different Turk

Note: I have excluded a great deal of personal information we exchanged. BTW he is also living again in Turkey and all is going well and has extended me an invite to visit...

Hi Winston, Finally, I got myself out of this mess. Never again. I simply wanted to give my opinion and suddenly I got all kinds of harassment: not being a Turk or being a Turk, not having any integrity, being scared, or implications like 'not so dangerous'. You do seem to think me as someone very angry with Ceyhun, but you do not seem to see that he shows me a great deal of anger as well. Since he writes some of his posts in Turkish you would not be able to see certain things anyway, and personally I do not care about this whole situation. You and I have not agreed on many points, but still kept some kind of respect for each other. I thank you for this and respect you for it. Until we are face to face, I do not think we will fully understand each other, so I do not mind too much at this point that we have some misunderstandings. I do not know much about you. I seem to think at the moment that you are trustworthy, so I do not find much trouble in explaining certain things. Maybe I am wrong, who knows, but I do not care anymore. That 'not so dangerous' part, however, hurt me a bit. It was uncalled for it. It is true that I am not as brave as I used to be anymore, probably more because I am a father now...

I love my country very much. I cannot even imagine being separated from it one day...

I have an extremely mixed ancestry.

my first language was Turkish and I was raised in Turkey.

at very young age, I was introduced to the idea of discrimination and being called 'gavur'. I never stepped back from a conflict, that is, a fight, even though I was alone in most situations

When I was ten or eleven, I do not remember, my Turkish citizenship was taken away from me, because they had decided that only those who had Turkish fathers, that is, whose fathers were Turkish citizens, could become Turkish citizens. I had to leave the country every three or four months according to the new law and come back in an hour.

I have always loved Turkey and seen myself as a Turk. I go by my Turkish name; that is my real name as far as I am concerned. And, one day, soon I hope, I will go back to the land I love the most.

Don't take me wrong. I am not attacking you. I just have to let off some steam, and since you seem to be a decent person, I am doing it at you. Otherwise, how would you know my situation? Perhaps you can now understand better why I find it very strange when people insult me, on the one hand, with not being a Turk, and on the other hand, as Ceyhun did, with being a nationalistic Turk. And, perhaps you can understand why I am a bit cynic at times, or sarcastic.

Full Turks like Ceyhun can pretend that they know what it means to be a minority in Turkey, but they will never know the risks involved.

I had to say all these things to someone I have so far found relatively trustworthy, because, in these forums, not being able to say certain things, especially about your own so-called identity, creates unnecessary psychological stress. So, I am relieved now, Thanks for listening to me...

[1.5 million]

From the same...(this individual and I have had many heated disagreements BTW)

Dear Winston,

You do not have to apologize at all. It was a blessing that you said what you said. It had actually opened a very wide world in my mind.

Since you are there and I am here you are probably lost with my words. Suddenly everything became very clear - almost like a revelation. Perhaps, this sounds a bit strange to you. One day I will try to explain it.

So, thanks again - that fragment, the less dangerous stuff, was all it was needed.

Armenian Genocide, politics, and ending the denial are all important subject s for me, but from a very different perspective. I do have a solution. It is simply a different solution. It is not really my solution either. It was tried in different contexts and it works. All it needs a chance in Turkey. I will not bother with this subject anymore, not publicly in the forums. I will probably get into some discussions in the XXX forum from time to time, but I will save my energy for Turkey mostly. Discussing this subject intellectually is definitely needed, but it is hardly enough.

This language needs to be explored; the intellectual dimension however is just not able to even penetrate into this dimension. That is the main problem. You however helped greatly in this with that so-called insult of yours, which is now so-called to me, to make my first incursion into this dimension. Thank you for your advice.

My friend, and I mean that, although we have our quite a few differences, you have been very helpful in ways that you did not really know. Even if you may get me very angry with some of your comments or arguments in future, and/or even if I may make some very arrogant remarks at times and get you angry at times, always keep in your mind that you will always stay as a very good friend to me, although we have not physically met yet. My home will always be your home, although at times I may find you a bit too American - just kidding (perhaps not).

[Romik]

someone, you seem like a small kid who follows to what they hear! It means hearing from TV how Turkish government denies it.

All of you turks compare Turkey's best with Armenia's worst. That is wrong.

All of you use the same small infomation of how Turkey was an "Angel". Don't forget, Turkey even thretened a US politician for expressing the truth about genocide! Turkey even doesn't let it's citizens to talk about it! Only that preoves that the 1915 genocide DID happen!