Armenia is under military attack, again by their neighbor, Azerbaijan. Few other countries have been tortured as much as Armenia has. The Ottoman Turks conquered Armenia in the 15th Century and held it until the end of World War I, then the Soviet Union seized it. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Azerbaijanis have taken up the task of brutalizing Armenia with constant armed conflict. All this while the world just looks on. In Bob Dylan's classic song, Blowing in the Wind, he starts the song with this lament: "How many roads must a man walk down Before you call him a man? How many seas must a white dove sail Before she sleeps in the sand?"
Most of the world recognizes the Turkish Armenian Genocide of 1915. Turkey does not to this day. Fearing the anger of Turkey, a Nato ally, the United States was reluctant to recognize the genocide until October 2019. It is a sad tale that the world knows very little of these tortured people. Click here for a fine piece on the Armenian Genocide in a 2015 article in the magazine, First Things. The genocide was repeated seven years later, in 1922, in the ancient city of Smyrna, now called Izmir. Two books have recently been published detailing what happened in Smyrna in 1922: The Great Fire by Lou Ureneck and Paradise Lost by Giles Milton. These two books are well researched and brilliantly written. Highly recommended reading.
The Turks, led by the brilliant military commander, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who later became the father of modern Turkey, after routing Greek forces, attacked and destroyed Smyrna and murdered at least 200,000 Christians, among them, Greeks and Armenians. They were particularly brutal in the massacre in Smyrna; the Greek Bishop of Smyrna, was tortured to death in front of a cheering crowd. Turkish soldiers went on rampages, looting, raping and killing women at will; with no one stopping them. People desperate to escape the carnage were trapped in the Smyrna harbor and not allowed to escape; many drowned in the bay trying to escape the fire that was coming toward them. European ships anchored in the bay refused to help them. Click here for a related story. The two books mentioned earlier go into great detail on the brutality. At the end of the rampage they set the city of Smyrna on fire and burned it to the ground.
It is estimated that as many as 1.5 million Armenian Christians were murdered by the Ottoman Turks in the 1915 Armenian Genocide. Historians believe that the Turks blamed their decline on the Christians, and that was a contributing factor in the genocide. History shows that the Ottomans were in decline for the prior century. The brutality of the Turks had no bounds; it was an example of man's inhumanity to man; The two books mentioned earlier go into great detail on how Armenian Christians were marched into the desert on forced marches without food or water. Many died of exhaustion and others were simply shot by soldiers along the way.
Religion is the glaring thread in this Armenian Genocide. Muslims, in general, did not keep it a secret that their goal was to eliminate all the "infidels." From the start, in the seventh century after Mohammed, the Ottomans made it their goal to conquer the world for Islam. A quick perusal of history will back this up. In the Middle Ages, we had the conquest of the Byzantine Empire with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, followed by many battles against the "infidels" such as the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571, and the two sieges of Vienna, Austria in 1529 and the last one in 1683. These wars have never really finished. Today we have different actors such as the 9/11 terrorists, Isis, al Qaeda and the like. The wars continue.
Another common thread is the passivity of the rest of the world, namely, the Europeans. After the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, the eastern part of the Roman Empire continued under the name of the Byzantine Empire which lasted another thousand years. During this last thousand years, the European Christian brothers watched and sat on their hands while the Byzantines were chewed up piece by piece. Toward the end, prior to the fall of Constantinople, the Europeans denied the fervent pleas of their Byzantine brothers, preferring not to help. One exception was a private military commander from Genoa, Giovanni Giustiniani, who collected a mercenary force of about 700 men and helped the Byzantines fight in the final battle for Constantinople in 1453. After the fall of the Byzantines, the Ottomans went after the rest of Europe as pointed out earlier in the battles of Lepanto and the sieges of Vienna. For the Europeans, it was see no evil, hear no evil. As the Spanish philosopher George Santayana once said, those who fail to learn from history are bound to repeat it. And the beat goes on.
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