[Arabesque]

Originally Posted by Variable

I'm not going to pretend to be well-read enough on the topic ...

Obviously.

They helped the Muslim segments of the population fight the Ottomans too. They were intervening in Ottoman affairs because they were at war with them.

There's a difference. They did not intervene to protect the rights of other Muslims (the Arabs), but instigated the Arabs against the Turks and helped promote Arab nationalism. They weren't really helping. They were looking out for their interests. It's probably the same with the Greeks and Armenians, except religion was involved. Or at least it was used as an excuse to intervene.

Again, though I admit I don't have a thorough understanding of the structure of the Ottoman government at the time, it would seem to me that the Sultan wasn't the key player in this. Instead the nationalistic government based around the Young Turks movement was calling the shots. This combined with legislation regarding the forced relocation, and seizure of Armenian property is enough to show that it wasn't simply the military getting carried away.

Interesting. So if you believe that the Young Turks were the ones in control, why do you call it an Ottoman/Turkish massacre against the Armenians? If the Sultan had no power over what was happening then, what makes it a state-crime against a minority group? Do you even know that the Young Turks Revolution was supported by the Armenians?

FYI - Muslims were displaced from areas to be later occupied by Armenians. After the Russian-Turkish war in 1915, more than a million Muslim were expelled from the conquered areas only to have Armenians come and settle themselves in.

In 1918, in fact, Armenians committed horrendous massacres against the Muslims of Erzerum. Even those Armenians who began the rebellion documented the Turkish losses, taking pride in not having lost as many as the Turks have. And no, they weren't targeting soldiers only.

Worst of all was the fact that they joined the Russian army to fight against the Ottoman state. That was an act of treason.

The debate I've always thought arose from whether or not the Turks knew that their actions would have the effect they did. Armenians point to the fact that no measures were taken to limit action by the armed forces or provide any sort of support necessary for their survival once they were evicted and their property was confiscated. According to them, the scale of the atrocity is enough to satisfy the condition for genocide.

Well, they'd better produce solid evidence then. Ottoman archives exist, as well as Armenian archives, but the latter is not open to inspection. The massacres against Muslims have been well documented by the Ottomans, and in some reports, the numbers are said to have been half a million. With the Armenians, you'll hear a lot about oral history and how someone's grandma was an authority because she lived through it. I think serious scholarship requires more than just undocumented oral history to prove an incident had in fact occurred in history. Right?

"According to them" is not enough to convince me. I'm not denying the Armenian suffering. I'm sure many Armenians were subjected to indiscriminate killings by the Turkish forces. I still maintain that these killings would be best described as massacres, not genocide. Armenian archives (and those of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation) are still inaccessible, which doesn't help their case. Or maybe it does, if they're trying to hide something.

I think I need to emphasise that I am not trying to take sides here. The brutality of Turkish troops wouldn't surprise me, as it was experienced first hand in Syria. But there are no claims of massacres there.

Dropping the atomic bombs on those cities wasn't genocide. Neither was Dresden. They weren't trying to wipe out the Germans or Japanese as a people, niether in whole nor in part. They were trying to win a war, a total war unique to the planet's experience. There are plenty of debates on the morality of strategic bombing during the Second World War, but it's separate from this one. They don't fit the profile for genocide... not in any definition I've scene.

Did the dropping of the bombs not result in the annihilation of a huge number of people? But they were not wiped out, right? What's the difference here? You want to call the killing of Armenians a massacre; then by all means ... There are Armenians living in Turkey today. One author who wrote an extensive report about Armenians in Turkey (in 2002) estimated their number to be 40,000. That, in addition to the fact that Armenia is an independent country today, shows that it could not have been a genocide or an attempt to systematically exterminate the Armenians.

Based on many of the casualty estimates out there, it could be said that a sizeable portion of the Armenian population was killed, on account of them being Armenian.

Casualty estimates recorded where, when and how? The archives are closed, so your information is based on what? They weren't killed for being Armenians; they were killed for being rebels, who employed violent (and I dare say terrorist) means and collaborated with the enemies (the allies at that time) against their country of "citizenship". You can choose to ignore the fact that they had fired the first shot, but that won't change facts.