The Armenian Genocide
On This Day in History: April 24
I’d like to visit Turkey. After this story, that might not be possible. It’s about the Armenian Genocide: a systematic murder of almost 1.5 million people by the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Turkey denies it ever happened.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: April 24, 1915--
Armenians are documented to have lived in the region for 2,500 years, almost a thousand years before Turks arrived. Centuries later the groups were divided not just along ethnic lines, but religious. The Christian Armenians were mostly peasant farmers; the Turks, representing the ruling Ottoman Empire, were Muslim. As in most lands conquered by Muslim invaders, the Armenians were permitted to remain Christian so long as they paid for the privilege via a tax, called a jizya. Regardless, Armenians were referred to as gavurs, which meant “disloyal” and “not to be trusted.”
So let’s just fucking kill them, the Turks decided.
The impetus was WWI. The Ottoman rulers of Turkey worried the Armenians would ally themselves with the invading Russians. The Ottomans had already lost their Balkan territories and were faced with losing Arab territories. In January 1915 the Ottomans got their asses kicked by Russians at the Battle of Sarikamish. The Ottoman Minister of War, Enver Pasha, said hey it wasn’t my shitty plan that lost the battle, it was Armenian treachery!
There was isolated Armenian resistance against Ottoman massacres, and the government used that as an excuse to wipe them out, seeing their own citizens as their greatest enemy. At first, Armenians were kicked out of the army, then killed because they didn’t want any trained soldiers teaching other Armenians to fight. On April 24, 1915, the genocide officially began with the arrest and deportation of hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople (now Istanbul).
The “men,” meaning any boys aged 12 or older, were separated and marched away to be murdered. Popular methods were to throw them off cliffs or tie them together and throw them in the river to drown. Long after the genocide the waters downstream were polluted by rotting corpses. Over the next year approximately one million Armenian women, children, elderly, and infirm were death marched into the Syrian desert to die of exposure and starvation. During the marches they were given no food or water, and were subject to random massacres, robbery, and rape. Those who survived often faced forced conversion to Islam, and/or being sold into slavery, including sexual slavery.
Turkey basically says hey it was war and people die in war get over it. Turkey’s current leader, President Erdoğan, calls any discussion of the genocide a smear campaign against his country. Despite the vast majority of historians proclaiming it a genocide, only 9% of Turks agree. Out of fear of angering Turkey, fewer than three dozen countries officially acknowledge the Armenian Genocide. The U.S. didn’t officially until 2021. Based on the “success” of the Armenian Genocide, the Turks immediately did it again, murdering several hundred thousand Christian Ottoman Greeks.
It is alleged that Hitler was inspired by the Armenian Genocide to commit the Holocaust.
NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.
Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.
Thank you for writing about this. My late husband's grandfather was a survivor of the Armenian Genocide. He was in the Turkish army and his commander told him to get his family out of the country just days before the genocide started. The commander helped him and they fled to Marseille, France. They were there about 3 years before they immigrated to California. We have a large Armenian community here, many of whom are descendants of survivors. It's a painful subject in our community even more than 100 years later. Thanks again for acknowledging this dreadful historical moment.
My girlfriend went last year on a tour and loved it - I've never had any desire to go there, much like why I'll not be heading to the U.S. - current government and policies.