On top of that a few boards ago Sophia that the muslims were ruining Europe and now we find that they’re running America.

What a topsey turvey world we live in.

No problem, thaqnks for clarifying.

@ Hasan,

Thanks for the very interesting post, and I take your (good) points and corrections.

I am sure that the members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who decided that 95 years latter to belatedly, if accurately, call what happened to the Armenians genocide were primarily motivated to a desire to score points with their Armenian & Greek constiutients just as those who voted against were primarily motivated by various defense contractors who probably employ large numbers of their constiutents.

I am not sure that the devsirme is of the same quality as the mass murder of entire families, villages, towns and districts. It seems to me to be like trying to make an equivalence between compulsory service for Jews in the Tsarist army, which was incredibly harsh both for the recruit and the family likely not to see its child again, and the torching of entire villages and towns in a pogrom. Even then the devsirme did not apply to all Christian children; nearly all Greeks were exempt. But as Peter Sugar, Edgar Hoesch, Mark Mazower, Bernard Lewis, the Barbara and Charles Jelavich (just a few of the twentieth century’s most eminent Balkanologists and Ottomanists) and others point out, families across the Balkans, including Christian Serbia and Christian Bulgaria, put their children forward during the devsirme. Some saw it as oppression; many saw it as a means of advancement for their families, given that their sons had the chance of reaching the highest offices of the Empire. There is a peasant literature of loss for children taken in the devsirme – but Speros Vryonis notes that it is largely in Greek, the language of the very people exempt from the devsirme.

One could also point out that these happened in completely different societies: the Armenian genocide took place between 1915 and 1917 – the devsirme was abolished in 1648. This would be the equivalent of criticizing Gordon Brown’s administration in terms of British conduct in the War of Jenkins’ Ear or, dare it be said, of Britain’s then flourishing slave trade.

The point of my post above is that there is a school of thought in foreign policy called realism, to which I do not subscribe but is popular especially among Republicans, which views the Armenian genocide as being of far less practical interest to the US than maintaining a strong alliance with Turkey.

This school of thought has prevailed for some time. I am puzzled by those who view the reluctance of Obama to condemn the genocide with particularly strong declarations of nausea. It is not as if this happened during his period of office; there have been sixteen administrations before his, both Republican and Democratic, whose chief executive could, whenever he chose, have accused the Turks of genocide. But they chose not to. There have been 46 Congresses, Democratic and Republican, that could at any time have passed a motion condemning the murderous nationalists who were responsible for these crimes; but they didn’t.

The realists would say that this was of no matter – until FDR, the administration was anxious to avoid becoming entangled in foreign problems, and his administration wanted to keep Turkey out of the war. The Truman Doctrine provided aid first for Turkey and Greece and then NATO membership in order to ‘contain’ the Soviet threat. Throughout the Cold War, doing anything that would be seen to jeopardize the alliance with Turkey was viewed as both dangerous and stupid. Since then, Turkey still has a border with America’s deadliest enemies, this time Iran and Syria. When Kissinger points all this out, he is hailed by many on the right as a genius. When anyone in the Democratic party says the same thing, they are accused of sickening dhimmitude. Go figure.

the failure of the israeli government on this issue is also an absolute disgrace, and given the fact that relations with turkey are already at rock bottom

Relations with Turkey are bad, but are they really in the same category as Iran and Syria?

“I say recognize the Armenian Genocide and inform Turkey that if they’re free to find other arms suppliers for their campaigns against the Kurds”
Not that the Kurds come out of this smelling of roses. In terms of the Armenian genocide, they were the proto-Janjaweed.

There was no such motivation present in the Armenian case; Armenians were to be annihilated for power-political reasons, and in Turkey only…

From what I understand traditional Islamic supremacism had no small part in the underlying motivation. They -the Armenians – were referred to as ‘kuffar’ and, a Jihad it was declared including against ‘internal enemies’ by the Turkish regime 4 Nov 1914.

Erdogan has improved relations with the Kurds.

“If you want to win friends and influence genocidal maniacs, never accuse them of being genocidal maniacs, at least not until you’ve got the cuffs on them.”

Indicting Karadzic and Milosevic put them in boxes and limited their freedom to wreck havoc. (http://greatersurbiton.wordpress.com/2008/07/22/bashir-indicted-and-karadzic-arrested-what-are-the-lessons/)

Dayton came about, in part, because Milosevic had freedom to conclude an agreement and ram down the Pale Gang’s collective throats due to Karadzic’s ICTY indictment keeping him out the discussions.

The Armenian genocide was committed by the Turanist CUP government of the Ottoman Empire, a government whose pan-Turkish nationalism brought misery to its citizens, both Muslim and non-Muslim, of a quality not experienced before.

In fairness, the Ottoman Empire had been bringing quite a high quality of misery to its Christian Balkan subjects for centuries by the devşirme policy of taking away their male children as slaves.

@ Monty,

You are right on the mark about Obama. From a UK foreign policy point of view, Obama has stuck the knife in while we are already bleeding on the US’s behalf (and at a higher rate per capita population than the US itself, David All might like to bear in mind…). Next war the US gets into, let’s hope they fight it without the UK as an ally – I’m sure our cousins can rely on help from their trusty friends in Russia, Iran and Argentina.