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So I thought the Armenian is just a collision without deeper meaning, the sort of dissonance that all ideologies have to paper over occasionally. But because the Turkey in the loop not only provides resources for the activism in Europe but still actively sets the agenda, the Germans use it as an indicator of loyalty in their conflict with Turkey, which is the actual problem. I knew euroturks have their nationalist shibboleths that they care about; I didnt notice they were still so responsive to the situation in Turkey. Am I understanding you right?
From the austrian end myself, it doesnt feel like the discourse around the turks has changed much since the 2000s. I still do have the impression that we match them into the minority pattern in some sense. Admittedly it rare to meet someone whos very serious about this without being selected for it. Certainly poking at the associated PC taboos is much less serious then with the jews. With the turks, someone "correcting" you might imply that he knows we just have to pretend to believe this - but it still is there. I can see though how that difference might look much smaller on our end then the receiving one.
For most Turkish people the Armenian genocide represents mainly a time period when outside powers set out to destroy or dominate us, and used the ethnic fractures of the Empire for their ends. The feeling is that they were treacherous at our time of need, and things that happened were unpleasant but deserved and just. So when the topic is brought up it is done so in bad faith and as a tool of domination and therefore the response must be harsh and uncompromising because that is what high asabiyyah communities do when they are under attack. So there is no dissonance in people's minds. I can write further later about how this attitude has formed since until 70s-80s it was well known and accepted by virtually everyone what happened in 1915 and there was no such fighting over history.
Yes I think so. People still vacation back in Turkey almost every summer, watch Turkish TV at home, find marriage partners from back in the village (even instead of other local Turks), socialize their kids at mosques etc. There is very strong emotional connection. I think in the case of America, the cultural and economical power of the country is so immense that no immigrant group can resist almost total assimilation in a generation. Germany, Belgium etc lack such a strong culture and the will to create one so they are failing to break the cohesion of most groups who can't find themselves a place in the overarching American superstructure. It creates a large opening for the Turkish state to exploit. Often it is not even that cynical, the immigrants themselves really want the attention and the sense of belonging and will complain how Turkey should do even more to stay connected with them!
Is it your opinion that it was deserved and just to kill all those armenians? Your empire wasn't seriously threatened at the time, shit you went to war for two german tubs. Okay perhaps some light ethnic cleansing/population exchange was necessary in some sense, but referring to
genocideindustrial scale killing of civilians as just and deserved?I quite like the turks I know, but I chalk that up to he influence of their ‘father’, who rightly despised Islam. I thought perhaps the turks could secularize the rest of the muslim world, show them how it's done. But when Erdogan seemingly decided to roll back his influence, for me the prospect of letting turkey into the eu lost all appeal.
No I don't think so. But I also find the special place this event is starting take in European consciousness quite absurd. It was just an iteration in a very long and bloody series of ethnic violence that has been taking place due to dissolution of the Empire. Almost any ethnic group found themselves on the receiving and giving ends of the violence at different times, and it is still going on in some ways in Balkans, Caucasus and Levant. I wish my fellow countrymen could be a bit more honest about our near history but I am also aware that massive portions of my fellow countrymen were recent refugees of very cruel ethnic cleansings in Balkans and Caucasus at the time when these events were taking place, so the appeal of creating a safely homogenous country and their ruthlessness is not difficult to understand. The current push to recognize the events of 1915 as a uniquely sacred and punishable minor holocaust is politically motivated revisionism.
This is entirely historically illiterate so I don't know how to respond to be honest. Just to make it clear, the event that is considered the start of the genocide (the rounding up of Armenian intelligentsia and MPs in Istanbul) took place literally the day before the Allied naval operation to force through Dardanelles and decapacitate the Empire has started. At the time everyone in Istanbul believed the assault would succeed and the government would fall in the coming weeks with the victorious Allies partitioning the Empire along ethnic lines quite favorable to certain ethnicities. "Seriously threatened" indeed.
Sorry but it sounds like your love is more for a neo-con fantasy land rather than a real people.
The day before? Usually, consequences happen after causes. They had crushed an allied fleet the previous month. If they were finished and expected to be judged by the allies in a few weeks, launching a series of mass murders was not the best legal defense.
And they didn't have to go to war in the first place. The austrians and hungarians didn't kill minorities en masse when it started to look like their empire was on the way out. Choices were made, this was not self-defense against incomprehensible franco-english aggression. Turkey started the war stupidly, and then compounded it with great evil.
My 'quite like' is not some unconditional love for the people, regardless of what they do or believe. Are you denying that erdogan and his supporters have chosen to move away from the french model and towards the islamic model? I'd rather have a secularized turkey in the EU than nothing, but I'd rather have nothing than your usual muslim country. I expect future eu countries to broadly adhere to european values.
I will stop here because you are either not arguing in good faith or have absolutely no clue what you are talking about and just do cursory wikipedia checks before coming up with very confident responses.
Typically when the two most powerful navies in the World announce their plans to force themselves through your waterways and take over your capital, and then do months long build up of massive armadas, you don't learn about the event on the literal day it starts.
What are you even talking about? This isn't some internet gotcha fight between twitter anons.
Serbians, Russians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Croats, Romanians, and even Armenians themselves were very much killing minorities in their midst en masse wherever they managed to. Even the countries you are mentioning as "didn't kill minorities" literally formed the Nazi Germany/Axis 20 years later when they decided they got a bad deal, very much catching up on killing their minorities bit.
So 6 months before, they had declared war on the "two most powerful navies in the world", and now, they were certain they were done, before it had even happened? To anyone that is not a turkish nationalist, that is not a credible claim. This is the part where I ask for a source.
One thing I will say in your defense is that it’s likely the armenian genocide question is a pretext to keep turkey out, a PC objection covering for the more deep-rooted values difference I alluded to. The left doesn’t like to talk about european values, but they certainly can talk about mass murders. As you say, it’s hard to find a Volk with no blood on their hands. It’s likely that serbia will join the EU earlier than Turkey, and they don’t have a century’s worth of excuses to cushion the blow of their genovidal acts like turkey does. That said, it should still be denounced in stronger terms than ‘just and deserved’.
Anyway, let’s not leave on a sour note, we’ve had productive discussions before.
Did you end up losing your job due to russian sanctions, as you were predicting?
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I meant within german progressives, or the overall coalition. As in, turkish opinions on the treatment of the armenians is something progressives would have a problem with, but is not immediately relevant here and now, so absent the loyalty conflict they could have ignored it.
Yes indeed, and this is exactly what has happened for a very long time. Until 1974 (Turkish invasion of Cyprus) the whole Armenian genocide story was virtually unknown in the West. It was "remembered" afterwards and ever since served as a way of regulating the Western public opinion about the country by periodically discussing it or forgetting all about it depending on the relations between countries.
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