The Armenian Genocide Controversy is Debated by Many People. History Shows There Was a Conflict Between Turks and Armenians but Does it Fit the Definition of a Genocide?

Getting Armenian genocide on the U.S. political agenda is just another way of rewriting history so that people today can draw benefits from an event remote in world history. Let us discuss the facts surrounding the actual atrocities.

You can read in any of hundreds of properly researched and written histories of all the bad things the Ottomans did particularly in Greece, Turkey and elsewhere in Eastern Europe and Arabia when the Ottoman Empire held sway in the 19th and 20th century.

As if descriptions of their murder and plundering are not bad enough, the politically correct among the American Armenians are now insisting that the U.S. government admits that the Ottomans conducted Armenian genocide in Turkey that peaked in 1915.

These activists say it is not enough that Armenians in Turkey had no political voice and government did not help them but instead arrested them, massacred them and tried to chase them out of Turkey with fatal consequences for thousands of them.

No, the activists insist that the U.S. government uses the expression genocide. Anything else, they say, will serve to minimize what happened in Turkey in those terrible years. This kind of etymological terrorism, as practiced currently by politically correct groups, has the U.S. government all in a fret.

Despite the fact the marginalization of the Armenians and the move to get them out of Turkey at any cost does not meet the modern definition of genocide, the politicians are being forced into a corner.

The word genocide was certainly not in popular vogue. What's more, the Ottoman Turks went about their business in a way that does not meet any definition of genocide. They simply marginalized Armenians and chased them away.

That does not amount to Armenian genocide , which the term should be reserved for real incidents of genocide-such as what happened in the Nazi concentration camps to the Jews, or in Rwanda to the Tutsis and in the Darfur region of Sudan to the Fur, the Zaghawa and the Massaleit tribes.

Gregory H. Stanton, the President of Genocide Watch, has described the eight stages of genocide; the Armenian genocide does not meet the criteria. The criteria he sets definitely apply to modern conditions, modern politics and modern resource wars.

Stage 1, according to Stanton, is classification.
In Ottoman times, there was no classifications. You had people who were Moslem Turks and you had people who were Armenian Christians.

It was simple tribal stuff and you didn't need identity documents to find out who was who. Stage 2 is symbolization, says Stanton. For instance, the Jews were marked with yellow stars on their clothing in Nazi Germany. Again, this was unnecessary. The Armenians were different in dress, language, culture and religion.

It was an old-fashioned war in the Moslem tradition, an attempt by the Ottomans to wipe out the infidels who were causing trouble by making political and territorial demands.

ALLEGED ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: WAR

Stage 3 of genocide is dehumanization, and this was disgracefully unnecessary for the Ottomans to do.
There was no propaganda war going on. The Ottomans did not have to persuade anyone that the Armenians were sub-human. They just went in and killed them.

The same goes for Stage 4 of genocide, which is organization.
The U.S. army got really organized for Desert Storm, identified the Axis of Evil (Saddam Hussein and his army), and went in and fixed them good. Was this genocide? No, it was war for self-serving reasons about a struggle for power in the region because of oil resources.

The same goes for the Ottomans. They sent in militia and groups to annihilate the Armenians. Wars have been waged like that since time immemorial. Why now try and call it something else?

ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: COOKED STORY

Stage 5 is polarization, which does not apply to the Armenian situation in history.
The list has been halfway analyzed and Armenian genocide meets none of the criteria thus far.
They were polarized in religion, culture and language anyway, which made them a clear-cut enemy. No propaganda was needed to polarize them: they were already.

Stages 6, preparation , and 7,extermination , do not apply to the Armenian example, either.
From about 1860 to 1915, the Armenians had been getting up the noses of the Ottomans and the Ottomans had oppressed them, with the efforts peaking in 1915. This was no different from thousands of such conflicts over time in history.

THE DENIAL

Stage 8 is denial.  The Ottomans never denied that they had been trying to get rid of the Armenians. Where are they now? The Ottoman Empire is now very much long gone.

How Armenians are attempting to have Armenian genocide classified is grossly incorrect, as the relevance of what constitutes a genocide in modern history is clearly defined.