Armenia’s thousands of years of history included independence, interspersed with occupations by:
Assyrians, Medes, Achaemenid Persians, Greeks, Parthians, Romans, Sasanian Persians, Byzantines, Arabs, Seljuk Turks, Mongols, Ottoman Turks, Russians, Safavid Persians, Afsharid Persians, Qajar Persians, and again Russians.
Armenia’s medieval capitol of Ani was called “the city of a 1,001 churches,” with a population of 200,000, rivaling the populations of the cities of the largest cities of the era, such as: Constantinople, Baghdad, Damascus, Florence, Rome, Paris, London, and Milan.
Islam emerged in the 7th century and quickly conquered throughout north Africa, Egypt and the Middle East.
In 704 A.D., Caliph Walid tricked Armenian nobles to meet in St. Gregory’s Church in Naxcawan and Church of Xram on the Araxis River.
Once they were all inside, he broke his promise, a practice called “taqiya.” He had his soldiers surround the church, set it on fire, and burn everyone inside to death.
In 1064, Muslim Sultan Alp Arslan and his Seljuk Turkish army invaded Armenia and after a 25 day siege, destroyed the city of Ani.
Arab historian Sibt ibn al-Jawzi recorded:
“The city became filled from one end to the other with bodies of the slain … The army entered the city, massacred its inhabitants, pillaged and burned it, leaving it in ruins … Dead bodies were so many that they blocked the streets; one could not go anywhere without stepping over them. And the number of prisoners was not less than 50,000 souls … I was determined to enter city and see the destruction with my own eyes. I tried to find a street in which I would not have to walk over the corpses; but that was impossible.”
Ottoman Turks reduced conquered Christians, Jewish, and non-Muslim populations to a second-class status called “dhimmi,” and required them to annually ransom their lives by paying an exorbitant tax called “jizyah.”
Sultan Murat I, 1359-1389, began the practice of “devshirme” — taking away boys from the conquered Armenian and Greek families.
These innocent boys were systematically traumatized and indoctrinated into becoming ferocious Muslim warriors called “Janissaries,” similar to Egypt’s “Mamluk” slave soldiers.
Janissaries were required to call the Sultan their “father” and were forbidden to marry, giving rise to depraved practices and abhorrent pederasty — “the sodomy of the Turks.”
For centuries Ottoman Turks conquered throughout the Mediterranean, Middle East, Eastern Europe, Spain and North Africa, carrying tens of thousands into slavery.
Beginning in the early 1800s, the Ottoman Empire began to decline. Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania won their independence.
When Armenia’s sentiments leaned toward independence, Sultan Abdul Hamid II put an end to it by massacring 100,000 from 1894-1896.
President Grover Cleveland reported to Congress, December 2, 1895:
“Occurrences in Turkey have continued to excite concern … Massacres of Christians in Armenia and the development … of a spirit of fanatic hostility to Christian influences … have lately shocked civilization.”
The next year, President Cleveland addressed Congress, December 7, 1896:
“Disturbed condition in Asiatic Turkey … rage of mad bigotry and cruel fanaticism … wanton destruction of homes and the bloody butchery of men, women, and children, made martyrs to their profession of Christian faith …
Outbreaks of blind fury which lead to murder and pillage in Turkey occur suddenly and without notice … It seems hardly possible that the earnest demand of good people throughout the Christian world for its corrective treatment will remain unanswered.”
President William McKinley told Congress, December 5, 1898:
“The … envoy of the United States to … Turkey … is … charged to press for a just settlement of our claims … of the destruction of the property of American missionaries resident in that country during the Armenian troubles of 1895.”
On December 6, 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt reported to Congress of:
“… systematic and long-extended cruelty and oppression … of which the Armenians have been the victims, and which have won for them the indignant pity of the civilized world.”
Sultan Abdul Hamid the Second made a league with Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, trading guns for access to oil.
When Sultan Hamid was deposed in 1908, there was a brief euphoria among the citizens of Turkey, as they naively hoped the country would adopt a constitutional government guaranteeing individual rights and freedoms.
Instead, the government was taken over by the “Young Turks” — three leaders or “pashas”: Mehmed Talaat Pasha, Ismail Enver Pasha, and Ahmed Djemal Pasha.
They acted as if they were planning democratic reforms while they clandestinely planned a genocidal scheme called “Ottomanization,” ridding the country of all who were not Muslims Turks.
The first step involved recruiting unsuspecting Armenian young men into the military.
Next they made them “non-combatant” soldiers and took away their weapons.
Finally, they marched them into the woods and deserts where they were ambushed and massacred.
With the Armenian young men gone, Armenian cities and villages were defenseless.
Nearly 2 million old men, women and children were marched into the desert, thrown off cliffs or burned alive. Armenian cities of Kharpert, Van, and Ani were leveled.
Entire Armenian populations were deported to the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia where hundreds of thousands were killed or starved to death.
During World War One, Armenia briefly received aid from Russia until that country’s military was decimated by German artillery, followed by Tsar Nicholas the Second being killed during Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution.
Theodore Roosevelt recorded the fate of Armenians in his 1916 book Fear God and Take Your Own Part:
“Armenians, who for some centuries have sedulously avoided militarism and war … are so suffering precisely and exactly because they have been pacifists whereas their neighbors, the Turks, have … been … militarists …
During the last year and a half … Armenians have been subjected to wrongs far greater than any that have been committed since the close of the Napoleonic Wars …
Fearful atrocities … Serbia is at this moment passing under the harrow of torture and mortal anguish …”
Roosevelt continued:
“Armenians have been butchered under circumstances of murder and torture and rape that would have appealed to an old-time Apache Indian …
The wholesale slaughter of the Armenians … must be shared by the neutral powers headed by the United States for their failure to protest when this initial wrong was committed …
The crowning outrage has been committed by the Turks on the Armenians. They have suffered atrocities so hideous that it is difficult to name them, atrocities such as those inflicted upon conquered nations by the followers of Attila and of Genghis Khan …
It is dreadful to think that these things can be done and that this nation nevertheless remarks ‘neutral not only in deed but in thought,’ between right and the most hideous wrong, neutral between despairing and hunted people — people whose little children are murdered and their women raped — and the victorious and evil wrong-doers …
I trust that all Americans worthy of the name feel their deepest indignation and keenest sympathy aroused by the dreadful Armenian atrocities. I trust that they feel … that a peace obtained without … righting the wrongs of the Armenians would be worse than any war.”
Historian Arnold Toynbee wrote:
“The Turks draft the criminals from their prisons into the Gendarmeri – military police – to exterminate the Armenian race …
In 1913 the Turkish Army was engaged in exterminating the Albanians … Greeks and Slavs left in the territory … The same campaign of extermination has been waged against the Nestorian Christians on the Persian frontier … In Syria there is a reign of terror …”
Toynbee continued:
“Turkish rule … is … slaughtering or driving from their homes, the Christian population … Only a third of the two million Armenians in Turkey have survived, and that at the price of apostatizing to Islam or else of leaving all they had and fleeing across the frontier.”
Armenia’s pleas at the Paris Peace Conference led Democrat President Wilson in a failed effort to make Armenia a U.S. protectorate.
The Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, issued a decree in 1918 that the Syrian lands should:
“Protect and to take good care of everyone from the Jacobite Armenian community living in your territories and … defend them as you would defend yourselves … they are the Protected People of the Muslims.” (Ahl Dimmat al-Muslimin).
Woodrow Wilson, who was born December 28, 1856, addressed Congress, May 24, 1920:
“The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations has established the truth of the reported massacres and other atrocities from which the Armenian people have suffered … deplorable conditions of insecurity, starvation, and misery now prevalent in Armenia …
Sympathy for Armenia among our people has sprung from untainted consciences, pure Christian faith and an earnest desire to see Christian people everywhere succored – helped – in their time of suffering.”
In 2006, Director Andrew Goldberg produced a documentary film The Armenian Genocide.
In 2016, actors Christian Bale, Oscar Isaac and Charlotte Le Bon starred in the film The Promise, depicting the Armenian genocide in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. In some areas, entire Armenian populations were decimated.
Some heroic and caring Turks refused to carry out orders kill Armenians and were themselves punished, as represented in a scene in The Promise, where the character Emre Ogan, played by Marwan Kenzari, risked his life to rescue American journalist Chris Myers, played by Christian Bale.
On August 29, 2014, the California Senate unanimously passed the Armenian Genocide Education Act mandating that among the human rights subjects covered in public schools, instruction shall be made of the genocide committed in Armenia at the beginning of the 20th century:
“The Legislature encourages the incorporation of survivor, rescuer, liberator, and witness oral testimony into the teaching of … the Armenian, Cambodian, Darfur, and Rwandan genocides … teaching about civil rights, human rights violations, genocide, slavery … the Holocaust … and … the Great Irish Famine of 1845–50 …
For purposes of this article, ‘Armenian Genocide’ means the torture, starvation, and murder of 1,500,000 Armenians, which included death marches into the Syrian desert, by the rulers of the Ottoman Turkish Empire and the exile of more than 500,000 innocent people during the period from 1915 to 1923, inclusive.”
Hitler allegedly gave orders August 22, 1939, to brutally invade Poland, adding: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Secular leaders, such as Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Egypt’s Gemal Nasser, Iran’s Reza Pahlavi, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Syria’s Hafez al-Asad, had ushered in an era of moderation and tolerance in the Middle East, but their legacy has been rejected by fundamentalists.
Attaturk was the founding father of the Republic of Turkey and served as President from 1924 to 1938, ushering in era of moderation.
He abolished sharia courts, and made Friday a workday, instituting the “weekend” of Saturday and Sunday. He outlawed polygamy and elevated the status of women, appointing the first female judges, and insisting on education of girls.
He abolished women wearing of scarves, veils, chadors or burqas – the full-length body dress worn by Muslim women, and requiring women to wear skirts.
Ataturk stated:
“If henceforward the women do not share in the social life of the nation, we shall never attain to our full development. We shall remain irremediably backward, incapable of treating on equal terms with the civilizations of the West.”
Ataturk wrote in his book on citizenship (quoted in Ataturk, Yurttaslik Bilgileri, Yenigun Haber Ajansi, June 1997, p. 18):
“Mohammedanism was based on Arab nationalism above all nationalities … The purpose of the religion founded by Muhammad, over all nations, was to drag them into Arab national politics … It might have suited tribes in the desert. It is no good for a modern, progressive state …
Even before accepting the religion of the Arabs, the Turks were a great nation … He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government.”
Ataturk abolished the position of the Sultan and set up a secular government He ended the religious Caliphate, thus preventing Muslim religious leaders from controlling government affairs.
In an effort to cut ties with the fundamentalist past, he introduced the western use of last names, replaced Arabic Islamic names with Turkish names, and encouraged the next generation not take Arabic names but instead ethnic Turkish names. He abolished the use of Arabic and Persian script, and replaced it with the Latin alphabet.
Attaturk abolished turbans and fezes – the red cap with a black tassel, and required men to wear western pants and suits. He even required Muslim prayer leaders be beardless, and replaced Arabic muezzin’s call to prayer and made praying a private affair.
In some Islamist countries, minorities in have continued to suffer persecution and even genocide:
Iraqi Chaldean Christians, Assyrian Christians, Syriac Christians, Lebanese Maronite Christians, Egyptian Coptic Christians, Aramaic Christians, Melkite Christians, and Kurds.
Judge Learned Hand reportedly wrote:
“The use of history is to tell us … past themes, else we should have to repeat, each in his own experience, the successes and the failures of our forebears.”
Will and Ariel Durant wrote in The Lessons of History, 1968, New York: Simon & Schuster:
“Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew, if the transmission should be interrupted … civilization would die, and we should be savages again.”
Harvard Professor George Santayana wrote in Reason in Common Sense, 1905, Volume One of The Life of Reason:
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
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