Gun Control: Remembering The Armenian Genocide
BY Herschel Smith
11 years, 6 months ago
Fatma Muge Gocek, now a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, did not learn about the massacre of Armenian civilians as a student growing up in Turkey but began researching the topic after moving to the U.S. Her book Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and Collective Violence Against the Armenians 1789-2009 was published in November.
But such outspoken deviation from the official line does not come without its dangers. According to Boghossian, Turks who do so can be prosecuted under Turkish Penal Code 301, which makes it a crime to insult “Turkishness.” In the past, the code has been used against those who refer to the events of 1915 as “genocide.”
As for leaders outside of Turkey, there are other reasons to avoid the term that so riles the country, even if the violence itself is not downplayed. These reasons, as in the case of Obama’s avoidance of the term, are geopolitical: Turkey is seen as a key NATO ally. During the Cold War, Marsoobian notes, it was an important ally against the Soviet Union. Now Turkey is crucial in the fight against ISIS.
Obama famously promised as a presidential candidate in 2008 to use the g-word: “Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence. The facts are undeniable,” he said at the time. “As president I will recognize the Armenian genocide.”
Yet he did not use the word in his remarks on Thursday, calling the events Meds Yeghern (an Armenian term roughly translated as “the Great Catastrophe”) instead and disappointing Armenian-Americans who have been lobbying for recognition of the genocide committed against their ancestors for years.
Newsweek is soft-selling Obama’s treachery by pointing to NATO membership (NATO is powerless and Turkey has never done a thing as member of NATO) and being a so-called “ally” in the fight against ISIS (an ally which doesn’t exist in a fight that is not occurring). This has been going on for a while.
April 24 marks the centennial of the Armenian Genocide, a massive tragedy that brutally snuffed out the lives of up to 1.5 million Armenian Christians in the Ottoman Empire.
It was a systematic attempt to exterminate an entire race of people. And now, on the one hundredth commemoration, President Obama joins those who deny it by refusing to call it was it was: genocide. This is the seventh time he’s retracted his 2008 election-year promise that if elected he would recognize the Armenian genocide.
And it’s important to remember the framework in which the genocide occurred.
The government made a point of disarming Armenians and sent police into villages to search for and confiscate any guns. The father of my grandfather was charged with having firearms and was imprisoned. They never saw him again.
ISIS also imposed gun control immediately upon takeover of the terrain under its control. Totalitarians fear weapons as the only threat to their supremacy. Do not ever allow yours to be confiscated. The next step is enslavement and death.
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The Blaze TV had a great documentary on this subject on Thursday night. It is undeniable what happened. Amazing how politics trumps everything else nowadays.
I am sure that the Turks confiscated the guns for the sake of the children….not.
Stick to your guns–no matter what! by Matt Bracken If they come to take away your guns by force, they have declared war on the Constitution, and on you. At that point, war is joined, just as it was during another famous gun confiscation raid on April 19, 1775. If a firearm was legal in 2012, under the 2nd Amendment it’s still legal in 2013 and it will be legal forever, no matter what so-called “executive orders” are handed down or new “laws” are passed by a panicking Congress. Those who say otherwise are liars and traitors and oath breakers and domestic enemies. Every survivor of every genocide says the same thing: when they come to take your guns, shoot them! Make them take them, and their system of repression will be overwhelmed, because they don’t have millions of jack-booted thugs ready to do armed battles all over the country. If you give up your arms, you are placing your entire trust in the permanent future benevolence of the U.S. government. This trust is invariably fatal: ask the American Indians about those treaties that were guaranteed forever. History is clear, with numerous examples, of the danger of gun registration and gun control. The German gun registration laws were enacted duuring the 1920s Weimar Republic, years before Hitler came to power. German gun registration was mandated in the name of “public safety.” Note that phrase well. I’m sure today’s liberal utopians would agree that they were “common sense” and “reasonable” gun control laws. Don’t we all want “public safety?” Then Hitler rose to power, and used the gun registration lists to first disarm the Jews, and then to force them into starving, overcrowded ghettos, and finally into mass graves and gas chambers. The Nazi genocide of the Jews was enabled by those “common sense” German gun registration lists. Millions of Polish Jews were rounded up by German military police battallions. The German military police only needed a 1-10 ratio to their victims. A mere 100 German military police, (4-Fs in their forties, bottom of the barrel conscripts, not rabid SS), would round up and murder a town of a thousand Jews over the course of one day. The Germans would force them to sit tightly packed together on town plazas or sporting fields under the watch of only a handful of armed guards. The Germans would then march groups of twenty or thirty at a time at gunpoint into the woods for point-blank executions. A 1-10 ratio means the military police were not worried at all about meeting resistance. The victims were all previously disarmed. During the Armenian Genocide from 1915-23, two million Christian Turks were exterminated by being marched at gun point into burning deserts with no food or water. The Turkish gun registration laws were enacted in 1911, in the name of “public safety.” The genocide began a few years later, after the Armenians’ firearms were confiscated. Entire divisions of Russian troops hiked home from WW1 in 1917/18, carrying… Read more »
Obama mentor and ghost-autobiographer, the Weather Underground bomber Bill Ayers, stated that they would need to murder ten percent of the American population to achieve their socialist nirvana.
That was just the fraction they estimated couldn’t be “reeducated” in the camps they planned to set up, I’d expect the total to be a lot higher. Of course, as we’re seeing as Americans arm themselves like never before, things wouldn’t run as smoothly as they believed back then.
6. So what’s the matter with gun registration? To say that Turkey did not enjoy a smooth transition from being the seat of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, through World War I and into the modernist Ataturk era, would be a massive understatement. In those turbulent times, ethnic Turks, Muslims composing the vast majority of the population, considered their Christian minorities, especially the Armenians, to be disloyal and treacherous. In 1911, a national gun registration law was passed in Turkey, with no apparent ill intention beyond increasing public safety. In 1915, during the Great War, these gun registration lists were used to disarm the Armenian and other Christian populations. Army battalions cordoned off entire towns and did gun sweeps. Once disarmed, the official state violence visited against the Armenians ratcheted up to murderous levels. Typically, on town-wide sweeps, all of the men and boys were taken away by the Turkish soldiers, never to be seen or heard from again. Only after these Armenian “enemies of the state” were disarmed and completely helpless to resist did the final step begin: the officially sanctioned, ordered, led and conducted wholesale “deportations” of the Christian minorities from Turkey. These “deportations” were in reality forced marches into fiery deserts, accompanied by pervasive sadistic cruelty comparable only to the Japanese “Bataan Death March,” and the less known but much more deadly death marches of the last surviving Jews in Nazi hands as the Red Army closed in on Germany. Three decades earlier in Turkey, rape, roadside torture sessions ending in death, and the entire worst catalog of human abuses were standard procedure while the Christian Armenians were being marched into the deserts to die of thirst, hunger, exposure, and sheer brutality. The stragglers who could not keep up with the columns being force-marched without food or water by Turkish soldiers were killed with bullets, bayonets, swords and even crueler means (for sport and variety), until the columns were no more and the missions were complete. Between 1915 and 1923, one and a half of the two million Turkish Armenians were murdered, along with a half million Christians of other sects. The rest escaped from Turkey in one of the first great diasporas of a genocided people in the modern era. There is no need to build gas chambers or slave-labor gulag death camps in a country with ample deserts. In Turkey there is no Dachau or Auschwitz to memorialize the dead, just bones scattered in the sand and rocks a century ago, a model of efficiency that Hitler might have envied. (The Turks deny to this day that it happened, just as some deny the later Nazi holocaust.) But even after conducting this first modern mega-death holocaust, with diplomats and reporters covering the genocide with daily wire reports, Turkey was not expelled in disgrace from the community of nations. There was no Western boycott of the new Turkish state. Adolf Hitler noticed this 20th-century indifference to genocide, and so did Lenin and Stalin and other despots. After… Read more »
Stick to your guns and gear!
[…] same thing happened to the Christians in Turkey in the Armenian genocide. True to form in South Africa, where there is the beginnings of genocide against anyone who has […]