Reply to THE ECONOMIST article: THE ARMENIAN NARRATIVE WHITE WASHES ARMENIAN HATE CRIMES AND THEIR TURKISH VICTIMS Let the facts speak for themselves: 1914 ……Armenian nationalist movement had blossomed since the turn of the (20th) century, armed and encouraged by the Russina, and several minor coups were repressed by the YOUNG TURK government before 1914. Denied the right to a national congress in October 1914, moderate Armenian politicians fled to BULGARIA, but extreme nationalists crossed the border to form a rebel division with Russian equipment. It invaded in December an slaughtered an estimated 120,000 non-Armenians while the TURKISH ARMY was preoccupied with mobilization and the CAUCASIAN FRONT OFFENSIVE TWOARD SARIKAMISH… The Macmillan Dictionary of The First World War, Stephen Pope & Elizabeth-Anne Wheal, Macmillan Reference Books, London, 1997, ISBN 0 333 68909 7 (and 2003, ISBN 0 85052 979-4,) page 34. 1917 “…For fourteen days, I followed the Euphrates; it is completely out of the question that I during this time would not have seen at least some of the Armenian corpses, that according to Mrs. Stjernstedt’s statements, should have drifted along the river en masse at that time. A travel companion of mine, Dr. Schacht, was also travelling along the river. He also had nothing to tell when we later met in Baghdad… …In summary, I think that Mrs. Stjernstedt, somewhat uncritically, has accepted the hair-raising stories from more or less biased sources, which formed the basis for her lecture…” Source: H.J. Pravitz, A Swedish officer, Nya Dagligt Allehanda, 23 April, 1917 issue (A Swedish Newspaper published from 1859 to 1944) 1923 …In some towns containing ten Armenian houses and thirty Turkish houses, it was reported that 40,000 people were killed, about 10,000 women were taken to the harem, and thousands of children left destitute; and the city university destroyed, and the bishop killed. It is a well- known fact that even in the last war the native Christians, despite the Turkish cautions, armed themselves and fought on the side of the Allies. In these conflicts, they were not idle, but they were well supplied with artillery, machine guns and inflicted heavy losses on their enemies…. Source: Lamsa, George M., a missionary well known for his research on Christianity, The Secret of the Near East, The Ideal Press, Philadelphia 1923, p 133 1928 “...Few Americans who mourn, and justly, the miseries of the Armenians, are aware that till the rise of nationalistic ambitions, beginning with the seventies, the Armenians were the favored portion of the population of Turkey, or that in the Great War, they traitorously turned Turkish cities over to the Russian invader; that they boasted of having raised an Army of one hundred and fifty thousand men to fight a civil war, and that they burned at least a hundred Turkish villages and exterminated their population...” Source: John Dewey, The New Republic, 12 November 1928 1976 “… The deafening drumbeat of the propaganda, and the sheer lack of sophistication in argument which comes from preaching decade after decade to a convinced and emotionally committed audience, are the major handicaps of Armenian historiography of the diaspora today…” Source: Dr. Gwynne Dyer, a London-based independent journalist, 1976 1988 “…In all the countries, under all the regimes, the staff of the armies in the field evacuate towards the back, the populations which live in the zone of fights and can bother the movement of the troops, especially if these populations are hostile. Public opinion does not find anything to criticize to these measures, obviously painful, but necessary. During winter of 1939-1940, the radical - socialist French government evacuated and transported in the Southwest of France, notably in the Dordogne, the entire population of the Alsatian villages situated in the valley of the Rhine, to the east of the Maginot line. This German-speaking population, and even sometimes germanophil, bothered the French army. It stayed in the South, far from the evacuated homes and sometimes destroyed until 1945….And nobody, in France, cried out for inhumanity…” Source: Georges de Maleville, lawyer and a specialist on the Armenian question, La Tragédie Arménienne de 1915, (The Armenian tragedy of 1915), Editions F. Sorlot-F. Lanore, Paris, 1988, p 61-63 *** Need I say more?
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 01:09:51 +0000